When life gives you lemons, they say make lemonade.
Well, when life gives you 3,500 litres of beer, make vinegar.
Perhaps it’s not as catchy but this is exactly what a brewery in West Wales did do the huge amount of beer they were left with when the first lockdown was called.
“We were gearing up for a really busy Easter and had just filled our cold store up with a huge amount of Cask Beer,” said Simon Turner, director and founder of Bluestone Brewing.
“When the first lockdown happened, we lost our market overnight. All of a sudden we had nowhere for all of that beer to go and it was a really worrying time for us as a business. Cask Beer has a short date life and so we had to come up with a plan quickly to save it from going down the drain.”
With 3,500 litres of their Summer Rocks beer ready to go, the North Pembrokeshire eco-friendly micro brewery was facing the difficult decision to pour it away. In conversation, Simon Turner mentioned this to Alex Jungmayr, director of nearby In the Welsh Wind Distillery.
Unwilling to sit back and watch the beer go to waste, Mr Jungmayr put his thinking cap on and came up with the idea of a Welsh cask-aged vinegar.
Mr Jungmayr said: “I was dismayed at the prospect of all this hard work - and beautiful beer - going to waste and was determined to see if there was something we could do to help.
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“Fortunately, I like a challenge. After I had done some research, vinegar seemed like the clear solution.”
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To ensure the final product would be top quality, Mr Jungmayr reached out to the team at Orkney Craft Vinegar - Celtic cousins already well versed in the art of vinegar making, The small team in Scotland have been making vinegar for several years. They were pleased to help, and provided expertise and vinegar ‘mother’ to get production underway. The mother is a substance composed of a form of cellulose and acetic acid bacteria that develops on fermenting alcoholic liquids, which turns alcohol into acetic acid with the help of oxygen from the air. It is added to wine, cider, or other alcoholic liquids to produce vinegar.
In the Welsh Wind then sourced oak casks from another Welsh whisky distillery to house the beer as the ‘mother’ worked its magic and transformed the beer into vinegar.
Unlike industrially produced vinegar, Mr Jungmayr says this cask-aged vinegar is softer and more complex on the palette.
This first batch of Welsh cask vinegar is available from both In the Welsh Wind and Bluestone Brewing Co, online and in their respective shops in west Wales.