During the summer, we had bought a pint of Alander’s Acres raw apple cider vinegar+”mother”. Then this past fall, we bought some raw apple cider from down in Amish Country. We had read several different articles on how to make your own ACV, and after we were completely overwhelmed, decided to “wing it”, lol… 🙂

So we let two gallons of raw apple cider ferment for 4 days on our countertop. (This was our attempt to turn the cider into hard-cider, like one of the articles we had read said to do…) Transferred the cider from the plastic jugs they came in into glass gallon jars and added the rag + rubberband on top, so it could “breathe”. On the 4th day, we added one cup of the “mother”+ACV to each batch. Re-covered them & waited… Here’s the end result after 2 months. 🙂

First, there’s the “sorta” successful batch. Rubberband had broken, so it was a fruit fly magnet. 😦 We were able to filter out the fruit flies and the vinegar was fine. But we threw the new “mother” or “scoby” (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) away. Figured there were probably fruit fly eggs that had been laid on it. 😦

Fortunately, the rubberband didn’t break on the other jar! 🙂

This is the “mother” we threw away…

Here’s the “mother” from the good batch in the new raw apple cider – I forgot to take a pic of it when it was on the plate, but you can see how much nicer/thicker it grew… 🙂

For this new batch that is fermenting right now, we decided to skip the part where we try to turn the cider into hard-cider. Just threw the new “mother” in the fresh gallon of raw cider along with 1c of the raw ACV from the previous batch. Perhaps a future blog post will reveal that outcome… 🙂

Moral of the story: always back-up your rubberbands, lol! 🙂

Oh – and what do we do with all our ACV??

Canning and pickling…

Healthy salad dressings (I prefer oil & vinegar as a salad dressing, but the boys prefer this ranch dressing)…

In our roasters as we cook down our beef and chicken broth (it helps to draw minerals like calcium, magnesium, and potassium into the broth)…

And in a tonic we drink to help keep our immune systems strong:
2T honey + 2T raw ACV + 1/2 gallon water all blended together. We each drink maybe 1c every other day or so… Click here for more fun beverage ideas. 🙂