Cherry vinegar (was supposed to be mead)

Question

Last week I started a cherry mead and discovered yesterday that it had turned to vinegar (and not even nice-tasting cherry-flavoured vinegar - it smelled and tasted awful, though the colour was great). I'm not sure how this happened, so I'm posting what I did in the hopes that someone can diagnose the problem before I try again.

1. Boil 4 litres (I make mead in a 5L jar on my kitchen counter - my apartment is not big enough for rows of carboys!) of water for 25 minutes.
2. Reduce heat to below boiling and add 1 kg (about 1L) of honey (plain, Billy Bee honey).
3. Remove scum from surface until no more scum forms.
4. Add 500 ml of washed, diced, pitted black cherries (tied up in a cheesecloth) to the water and honey
5. Add 750 ml of black cherry juice (bought at a nearby health-food store), because I didn't have very many cherries left.
6. Simmer for about 20 minutes.
7. Cool, add to fermentation jar, pitch yeast (Lalvin champagne yeast).

An observation: this batch fermented far faster and far more vigorously and violently than any other batch! Almost all of the sugar was consumed by fermentation within 4 days. In all my other batches, it typically took 8 to 12 days for this much sugar to be consumed.

I have used this variants of this process (minus the fruit), steps 1 - 3 and 7 for almost a dozen batches (all successful so far) over the past two years, so I'm thinking the problem was in the fruit.

This was actually my second fruit mead - the first one was with strawberries, and they were thrown in at the beginning of the process (Step 1, when boiling the water), I thought it would be important to sterilize them. I later read that fruit should not be boiled, or pectin would form and result in a very cloudy mead (and yes, the strawberry mead was tasty but also cloudy), and also possibly affect the flavour.

So I've been wondering about where the failure was:

• The cherries - Should they have been boiled, or sterilized in some other way? I have also read recipes that involve putting the cherries in during fermentation but to me that seems to carry an even greater risk of infection from outside sources.
  • Would I have better luck with frozen cherries (or other fruit), assuming that the frozen fruit is somehow sterilized before it's frozen?
• The cherry juice - It was supposed to have been pasteurized, but I admit I opened it a little before I made the mead, just to taste it.
• Bad luck??
• Something else in this process that I missed?

It was also suggested to me by a friend that cinnamon has antibacterial properties so I should put 1 or 2 sticks in when boiling the water (they also said the juice of one lime would work as well, but I'm not sure about that and I worry it would have a strong impact on the flavour).

Answer 1

How do you cover the 5L mason jar? Does it have any sort of airlock, and is there a means of preventing bacteria and/or fruit flies out of the jar? I ask because fruit flies carry acetobacter (they're also known as vinegar flies), and acetobacter turns alcohol into vinegar in the presence of oxygen. So if your mead was exposed to air and a fruit fly got in to it, it could well turn to vinegar.

If you're working with fruit - fresh, frozen, or otherwise unpasteurized - a good way to protect yourself is to add a bit of potassium metabisulfite to the fruit. ~200ppm is the threshold of detection. The effectiveness is determined by pH, but if you kept it under 100ppm you should cover all your bases - preserving, protecting against oxidation, and keeping it under the threshold of smell. Simmering the fruit, as you did, would have killed any baddies that came from the fruit.

Answer 2

My answer to a question like this is to ask the question, when was the last time you tasted vinegar?

Vinegar is a lot harder to make accidentally than you think. I mean yes it’s one way to spoil a wine and being extraordinarily careless will do it, but you generally have to try to make vinegar.

Chances are better than the wine is young and it had more of a rocket fuel / Nail polish remover flavor. Now that is a defect that is easily solved and that simply giving it time to mellow and age. Those sharp edges will smooth out a lot in 6 months and even better over a year or two. Honey makes great flavor in wine or melomel in this case, but only if you are willing to let it get smooth over time. Sometimes it just takes time.

Answer 3

Infection mixed with oxygenation during fermentation makes for vinegar. What does your cleaning and sanitation process consist of on the cold side? Do you use a spoon rest? What are you fermenting in? What do you use for an airlock?

Answer 4

• Rehydrate your yeast separately before pitching. Match temperatures before you pitch. Refer to instructions on the back of Lalvin packet. Temperature shocking the yeast could kill some of them or cause them to hibernate, leaving wild yeast and bacteria to take over and out-compete.
• Sanitize all your jars. You boiled the water, but did you sanitize the jar and airlock? That could introduce infection and wild bacteria.
• Maintain a temperature of 70F/21C during fermentation. Hot fermentation produces bad flavors. ("If must is fermented at too high a temperature, acetobacter will overwhelm the yeast naturally occurring on the grapes." - 1)
• No need to scrape dross off honey.

Vinegar is ascetic acid, produced by bacteria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetic_acid#Biochemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetic_acid#Oxidative_fermentation

Acetic acid is produced and excreted by acetic acid bacteria, notably the genus Acetobacter and Clostridium acetobutylicum. These bacteria are found universally in foodstuffs, water, and soil, and acetic acid is produced naturally as fruits and other foods spoil.

For most of human history, acetic acid bacteria of the genus Acetobacter have made acetic acid, in the form of vinegar. Given sufficient oxygen, these bacteria can produce vinegar from a variety of alcoholic foodstuffs. Commonly used feeds include apple cider, wine, and fermented grain, malt, rice, or potato mashes. A dilute alcohol solution inoculated with Acetobacter and kept in a warm, airy place will become vinegar over the course of a few months. Industrial vinegar-making methods accelerate this process by improving the supply of oxygen to the bacteria.