How to make Vinegar

A bottle of vinegar can be found in nearly every household.  It is setting on the shelf just ready for use on salads and as a taste enhancement in any number of recipes and for pickling and preserving foods.

Vinegar is the first thing we reach for when we need to clean off the spots on the windows and the mirrors.  If your dish washer needs and overhaul you just run vinegar through it.

Plant-wise Women have always used it topically in potions to retain and  enhance the beauty of their hair and skin.

In the early nineteen hundreds the medicinal/nutritional properties of vinegar fell out of favor along with medicinal herbs.  If you care to look, the health benefits are just astounding.
Vinegar is rich in mineral salts and potassium, which play an important role in metabolism,respiration, blood conditioning, and nervous system vitalization.
Vinegar is warming and helps with circulation so it helps with stagnant blood and can also move a stagnant mood.  It quickly reduces accumulations in the liver resulting from a bad diet.
***Vinegar neutralizes poisons in the body and it great for food poisoning.  Take 1/4 teaspoon every 15 minutes until relieved. 
It relieves damp conditions such as edema,overweight, excess mucus, and athletes foot.  (soak feet in vinegar to cure athletes foot)
Vinegar removes parasites and most worms that can live in the digestive tract.
Apply topically to get relief from the toxic effect of insect bites.
Dosage:  except where specified differently above, sip 1/3 cup water mixed with 1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar 3 times a day.

*Not for those with loose stools, muscular injury or weakness, and rheumatism.

Here is the bad news.  Distilled vinegar, like the FDA has approved, should Never be taken into your body or used topically because it is highly demineralizing.  (it is ok for the dish washer though)

You can buy alive vinegar at the health food store.  For the more adventurous, vinegar is super easy to make.

This aromatic sour liquid is made from a very simple two-step fermentation.

The first step of fermentation is accomplished when appropriate microorganisms turn sugar into alcohol.  These base liquids can simply be sugar and water or fruit juices.  Most vinegar is made from apples or grapes.  Apples being the base for cider vinegar and grapes being the base for wine vinegar.

The second step is accomplished by the action of the microscopic entity, Mycoderma aceti, which takes over and turns the alcohol into a dilute acetic acid.  Mycoderma A. is resident in all  free flowing air, and in time will find any alcoholic liquid left exposed.

Theoretically, you should be able to open a bottle of sweet cider and let it stand and after 5 weeks it will turn into a hard cider, then to vinegar. This process can be enhanced and quickened by adding a little "mother" from a previously made batch.

The mother is a naturally occurring, thick, jellylike substance that congeals at the bottom of the bottle.  It can be filtered out and passed from batch to batch as an inoculate which helps to insure that you continue to manufacture high quality vinegar.

Here is a better look at the mother.  You can purchase a mother at the health food store or you can just do like I did and strain it out of bottle that that I had almost used up.