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Our founder was a geography major in college (true story!) and is obsessed with place and products that reflect an authentic sense of place. The French call it terroir but we are not that fancy…

We are called American Vinegar Works because we only use quality American wines, ciders, beers, and sakes to make our vinegars. In this way, our vinegars build on the great work being done by the American craft alcohol community. Your local microbrewery was the inspiration for American Vinegar Works.

Traditional vinegar is made by fermenting some type of alcohol—think beer, wine, cider, sake – into acetic acid. To make vinegar you need five key ingredients: alcohol, vinegar bacteria, oxygen, heat, and time.

Depending on the ABV (alcohol by volume) of the specific alcohol you may need to add water to dilute the alcohol. This is because when you get to a certain height in ABV the vinegar bacteria simply cannot operate and eat away at the alcohol to transform it into acetic acid or vinegar. This, by the way, is why your bottle of scotch will never turn into vinegar.

Over time and at the right temperature the vinegar bacteria will eat away at the wine or cider and turn into vinegar. Depending on the level of ABV, the environmental conditions, and the amount of vinegar you are trying to make this can take anywhere from two weeks to about six months simply to complete the fermentation. During this time you will see that a film, often thick, will form on top of the liquid. This is vinegar mother and is a byproduct of vinegar fermentation.

Better traditional vinegars are then aged for months to years after fermentation. This allows the vinegars to develop more nuanced flavor profiles and not just be acid bombs.

Reach out if you have any other questions on how vinegar is made.

Absolutely. We ferment, age, and bottle all of our vinegar in our vinegar works in Massachusetts.

We know that even having to ask the question may strike some of you as crazy. But the modern food world can be a bit crazy. It is common practice for food companies to just be recipe and marketing companies. They come up with a recipe-- and sometimes not even a recipe—and then they go to larger centralized manufacturers called “co-packers” that actually make and bottle the products for them. As you can imagine this means foods are increasingly standardized and the “innovations” come in the form of marketing buzz and jazz hands instead of in the form of better foods.

As you might be able to tell this really bums us out both because it is misleading to consumers and because it leads to a bland standardization of our foods.

Mother always told us to “ Fight the vinegar industrial complex!” and we hope you will too.