Making Apple Cider Vinegar From Scraps
Like apple juice, the best apple cider vinegars are organic, unfiltered and raw (unpasteurized). Depending on where you live it may be hard to find really good apple cider vinegar.
Fortunately, it’s easy and very inexpensive to make. It just takes some time, naturally, to ferment. This varies depending on which of the two methods below that you choose to use.
This article will show you how to make apple cider vinegar using two different methods. The first method uses the scraps – cores and apple peels. The second method uses whole apples.
Method One – Make Apple Cider Vinegar From Scraps
This method uses scraps, like the peels and cores. I like this method because I get to eat my apples and make vinegar too. It’s also faster, taking around two months to complete the process.
You’ll need:
a large bowl or wide-mouth jar
apple scraps, the cores and peels from organic apples
a piece of cheesecloth for covering the jar to keep out flies and debris
Leave the scraps to air. They’ll turn brown, which is exactly what you want. Add the apple scraps to the jar and top it up with water.
You can continue to add scraps for a few more days if you want. If you’re going to do this though, be sure don’t top the jar right up, leave some room for the new scraps.
Cover with the cheesecloth and put it in a warm, dark place. A water cylinder cupboard is perfect.
You’ll notice the contents of the jar starts to thicken after a few days and a grayish scum forms on top. When this happens, stop adding scraps and leave the jar for a month or so to ferment.
After about a month you can start taste-testing it. When it’s just strong enough for you, strain out the apple scraps and bottle the vinegar.
It’s ok if your vinegar is cloudy, there will be some sediment from the apples and what’s known as “the mother”. It’s all good. If you don’t like the cloudiness though, straining it through a paper coffee filter will remove most of the sediment.
Method Two – Make Apple Cider Vinegar From Whole Apples
This method uses whole, organic apples and takes about 7 months to ferment into vinegar.
You’ll need:
10 Whole organically-grown apples
a glass bowl, and later a larger glass bowl
a piece of cheesecloth to cover the bowls
Wash the apples and cut into quarters. You can optionally core and peel them. If you do the scraps can be used to make apple cider vinegar by method one, above.
Let the apples air and turn brown. Then put them into the smaller bowl and cover with water.
Cover the bowl with the cheesecloth and leave in a warm, dark place for 6 months. Again, a hot water cupboard is ideal.
After the 6 months is up, you’ll notice a grayish scum on the surface of the liquid. This is normal. Strain the liquid through a coffee filter into the larger bowl, and leave it for another 4-6 weeks, covered with the cheesecloth.
And there you have it, your own homemade apple cider vinegar
How to use Apple Cider Vinegar
There are lots of ways to use apple cider vinegar. It can be used diluted with water as a hair rinse (don’t worry – the smell disappears quickly), you can also mix with water or fruit juice and drink it. Find out more about the health benefits of using apple cider vinegar in our brand new eBook below:
You only want Apple Cider Vinegar with the mother in.
That is too cool – I have a apple cider vinegar I just started and I guess I cheated! I juiced the apples then added champagne vinegar to it. That is so smart to use just the scraps though – I am going to try that next time. It seems much more traditional (and frugal lol).
Great site Donna!
Why is there such a difference in time for fermentation? It seems like it should be about the same since you are using the same ingredients…
I’ve wondered the same thing myself Jenn. The only reason I can think of, now that I have more experience with fermentation processes, is that using the whole apples you get more sugar, so the micro-organisms have more work to do and will take longer to metabolize that amount of sugar. With just the peels and cores, a much higher proportion of the brew is water, so the overall sugar content is going to be much lower. I’ve only actually made and tasted the peels and core version of this cider vinegar recipe, but I imagine the whole apple version has a stronger flavor.
is it okay to not use cider vinegar??
Hi joie. I’m not sure what you’re asking exactly… not use cider vinegar for the tonic? Use a different type vinegar, maybe? I’d say, no. Although other vinegars have other uses, the apple cider vinegar is the most beneficial and I wouldn’t recommend using, say white vinegar, for anything where you take it internally. I use it for cleaning purposes, great for that. Although white vinegar may not harm you, I really don’t know about the long term effects, but it’s not going to be beneficial in the ways apple cider vinegar is. I don’t use much apple cider vinegar now, because I make and drink a lot of kombucha which has really similar benefits, but I find it much tastier. I use kombucha in recipes too, salad dressings and the like, very much like I would use cider vinegar.
Are you having trouble find good quality apple cider vinegar? I may be able to help with some links to where you can buy it online, just let me know.
this site is so wonderfully helpful. i live in the Bahamas and recently opened a living food eatery… please always provide links for resources. thanks so much and if you are ever in this part of the world…please reach out!
its very good for weight loss
@fatima: thanks for commenting! I have read that ACV is good for weight loss, a lot of people actually rave about it.
ACV is the bomb! I discovered it last month when my BF was sick. I gave him 2T ACV and 6oz OJ. Right away it reduced fever aches and caughing. Since then I have been taking daily for my own health and detox. I have experienced many benefits to include sinuses clearing, body pain relieved, no heart burn in the last month, regular digestive system just to name a few. I started using the regular store brand ACV but they say to use the stuff with “the mother in it” which is the organic stuff. I have experienced great results off the store brand but will one day try the organic stuff. I have even lost a few pounds but at 120 already I need to watch it.
@Megan wow, thanks for taking the time to comment and report on those awesome results! And all from store bought ACV too, that’s great news because I’d never used the regular store bought kind I wasn’t sure how beneficial it really was. I’m sure you’ll notice even more benefits when you get raw (unpasteurized), organic, unfiltered (with the mother still in) ACV. Do try making some of your own too, if you can get hold of organic apples especially, but even if not it should still be better than the store bought kind. It’s really easy to do. I’ve just made my first batch of sauerkraut, which I love and it’s so good for you (I’ll be writing an article about it soon) and it was so easy. I had always had this idea that it was really hard to do. I thought you needed to have a special container and you needed juniper berries, and had to do it just right or it would go off. What I found is that it couldn’t be easier! Really it was just so simple I wish I’d started sooner! And all modesty aside, I must say it’s the best sauerkraut I’ve ever had! The ACV is just as simple.
thank you very much, a very good post, looking forward for your next article
is a brownish-gray scum at the top okay? It almost looks like mold! I’ve had mine sitting in a cabinet (dark) covered with a cloth secured with a rubberband and actually forgot about it the last few weeks – it had this grayish-brownish scum on top so I stirred it all up with a spoon, recovered it and put it back. Smells vinegary – yeasty –
thanks!
Hi Ronna, thanks for you question. It’s hard to tell for sure without seeing it, but it sounds like the natural scum that forms sometimes. I think it’s either the pectin and fiber in the apples and/or the mother of vinegar. Usually molds will be quite dry looking and furry, like the kind you find on bread or rice. After inspecting visually, I usually go with the sniff test to make the final decision if something is okay or not. If the vinegar had already developed, usually it has such a strong pH and that harmful molds and bacteria cannot live in that environment. The same thing applies to Kombucha, which is basically on it’s way to becoming a vinegar, and will do if you let it brew too long (it’s a really nice vinegar though). That’s also why vinegar is such a power cleaner and antiseptic (usually the white vinegar is used for cleaning and disinfectant purposes, because it’s cheap and not so beneficial to consume).
My son and I are trying to make ACV a la the Little House on the Prairie cookbook. I found your method since I was a bit unsure of some of the steps they recommended. Do you use purified water, distilled water, tap water? Also how long do you let the scraps brown before adding water? Thank you…we’re looking forward to seeing what develops!
Hi Ann & Julian. It’s great you’re making your own ACV! To answer your questions, we are on tank water, rain water so that’s what I use. It’s what comes out of our taps, but it’s not tap water. I would avoid tap water, it has chemicals designed to kill micro-organisms, and it will kill the good fermentations micro-organisms too. Purified water that has the chlorine, fluorine and other nasty chemicals removed would be my first choice of the ones you mention. I think distilled water would work as well. I’ve not tried it and I know there is a long-standing debate as to whether it’s really good for you (because it’s so purely H20) or not good for you (because it’s so devoid of any trace minerals, or life-force). But I have heard that if you ‘liven up’ distilled water by putting lemon or lime or orange slices in it, or wheat grass (or any clean grass), or strawberries that it becomes good for you. So I imagine the apples would work on the same principle.
As for how long we let the scraps brown for… you want to spread them out so they dry out a bit, and they will brown in that process. They just brown to an extent and then stop. You want to make sure they dry, rather than turn a wet brown, if you know what I mean. It’s a bit hard to explain, but if you could see it you’d ‘get it’ immediately. So you let them dry so the surface doesn’t appear or feel wet anymore. What that does I think is make sure they don’t turn ‘wet brown’ and start turning the fermentation alcoholic. I think different varieties of apples are going to turn a different shade of brown, and depending on how quickly they dry it’s going to affect the shade as well. So the color is not so important as the fact that they have dried on the surface. They don’t have to be crispy dry, just not wet like a fresh apple peel.
I hope that helps. Have fun! What a great thing to do with your son!
Plain vinegar from the store is just as safe to ingest as “apple cider” vinegar to use. In fact, if you read the label on your store purchased ACV, it will most likely state: “Apple cider FLAVORED distilled vinegar” Furthermore, if you read the ingredients: Distilled vinegar (diluted with water to 5% acidity), natural flavor, caramel coloring. It is made with plain vinegar and has apple cider flavor added. So, if you can make ACV yourself, IMHO, it would be much better, as in “the real thing baby”. Plus, you can make it a little stronger acidicly which is necessary for some pickling items.
It’s a good distinction you make Sophia, between real apple cider vinegar and the cheap commercial substitute that is just flavored white vinegar. But I still don’t think that white vinegar is that good to ingest (and neither is the cheap commercial “flavored” apple cider vinegar. I only recommend a high quality, raw, organic, unpasteurized, unfiltered apple cider vinegar, if you’re going to buy it, otherwise homemade is the way to go.
p.s. – a note about vinegars: do not store even temporarily in any type of metal. The acid leaches out metal particles and can be fatal or damaging if ingested. I.e. for chicken watering cans, you cannot add vinegar to the metal cans as it can kill your animals. They even found back in the 80′s that crystal decanters with wine stored in, had leached some of the lead into it the wine. Although vinegar is some great stuff, be careful how you store it. It is used a lot with livestock because it helps keep them free from worms and the like. I use it to water my rabbits as well, just a tsp. in a gallon of water does it!
Really good advice Sophia, and a good point you bring up. Plastic containers used for storage will also leach toxic chemicals into the vinegar. As we know many plastic containers will leach toxic chemicals into something as non-acidic as water. What you say about the lead crystal decanters can also apply to certain types of ceramics, depending on the glazes used.
I use apple cider vinegar daily in the mornings for my acid reflux, it helps tremendously! I would use it three times a day if I could! I’m curious as to the concentration others have it at. I use 1tsp organic ACV (with mother) or 1Tsp store bought ACV with a glass of water.
I want to try my hand at making some homemade ACV to cut down costs, seeing as my medical aid won’t cover it, even though I replace all my medication with it! Was also wondering- will this homemade ACV be as good as the organic I get from the health shop and will using non-organic apples make a difference?
Thanks Donna! I love your site and find myself referring back to it often. This weekend I spent at my friend’s house who happen to have some abandoned apple trees on their property. I asked them what they do with them and they replied, “Oh, nothing, they don’t look good and we are afraid they have worms.” I think people are so far removed from their roots, that they don’t want to touch anything that isn’t perfect and shiny from the grocers. So I am blessed with two bags of awesome tasting organic apples that me, the deer and a few insects are going to enjoy. I am going to make an apple pie and apple butter with the “meat” of the apples and go ahead and try my hand at the ACV for the first time albeit, my mother thinks I am going to kill myself in the process. The next time I visit my friend’s house, I am going to pick up some more for the full recipe. I’ll let you know how it turns out!
Wow, awesome score Heather! I totally agree with you that many people are so removed that from nature and the source of our food that they pay for poisoned, low-nutritive food in the supermarket when they often have trees growing in their yard and producing beautiful, chemical-free, nutritious food which falls on the ground and rots (or worse, gets chucked in the rubbish bin and goes to a landfill!). Great for you that you asked and took some apples home! I used to make my own apple butter all the time, I love it. I use tons of cinnamon in it, and it’s so delicious. I have a wheat allergy I have to manage, and wheat’s not so healthy for most people anyway, but I used to make my own wholemeal bread and put my homemade apple butter on it… divine!
Ironic your mom thinks you are going to kill yourself with homemade ACV when most people are doing just that by eating processed and packaged foods that they don’t even know what ingredients are actually in them. Crazy! Do post back and let us know how it goes, with everything. The thing with the vinegar is that if it does go bad… it’s really obvious (in my experience anyway). It smells really bad, it looks really bad, mold may be growing on it.
It’s really easy to make a beautiful, raw applesauce too. I basically made that as a base and then created a chia pudding with it. But I’ll have to post the applesauce recipe here, because you might want to try that too. Sometimes I do that with the recipes I think are ‘too’ simple. That’s me being silly though!
Do you have a worm farm? That’s a good way to use the scraps that you can’t use otherwise. Feed the worms! Let me know if you are interested in knowing more, I have an article I can send you too.
Enjoy! I bet your house is going to smell so mouth-wateringly beautiful over the next few days!
When you say top off with water do you mean just cover the scraps or fill the container. Sometimes I am one of those people that needs exact measurements. I am working on winging it but when I make something for the first time I don’t want to mess it up. My cousin recently got married and she wanted to make candy and caramel apples as favors so we got a bushel of apples. we made the favors for her wedding and still had a ton left over so I made apple sauce and apple butter. I used some of the scraps to make the juice for jelly, and I am using the rest to try my hand at ACV. I am really excited about it i love to use things that I would normally discard. thank you for you help.
oh… also I read some other recipes… none used the scraps like yours but they said to stir the mixture daily to aerate. Is that needed in this recipe? and the “scum that forms on the top, in the end do you skim that off or stir it right in?
Hey I would just like to say a great big thank you for this. I never really gave much thought to Apple vinegar before but it definitely sounds like something I would like to try. I am toying with the idea of veganism at the moment so I am gathering ideas which I can use to make this a viable option in my life.
Reading some of the comments here have been delightful, I never knew there could be so many health benefits from something so simple!
I have subscribed to your great blog as of this point! thanks!
Thank you Dave! Glad you’re enjoying it. I normally dislike vinegars, but apple cider vinegar is an exception. Much nicer taste and smell in addition to all those benefits. I’ve been using Kombucha vinegar in much the same way, and I suspect it has many, many health benefits too considering kombucha tea has so many. It’s easy to make as well, a bit quicker though. If you’re already making kombucha you just let it ferment for 21 days (or more) and it comes out really tart! Nice.
I want to find a couple oak barrels and a reciepe for that much apple cider vinegar and red wine vinegar. your website is wonderful. thank you, mike
Thank you Mike. I’ve seen small barrels for brewing somewhere online, with a tap on them. Not sure what they were made of. They were the sort of size you could keep in your kitchen and have your fermented vinegars on tap as well. I went on a tour of a winery and got to go into the wine cellar (which was a cave) and see all the barrels. They said they were quite expensive to buy and they could only use them once (or maybe twice, my memory is a bit hazy – I was doing some tasting as well). So I’m sure you could find ex-winery barrels. They are pretty trendy here, so they are rare, and I think still pretty expensive when you do find them. Good luck on your search though.
While others use yeast to ferment the cider, I have noticed you never mentioned about it. What’s the difference?
Hi Bool, thanks for the question. Some people use brewing yeast as a starter. But it’s not really necessary. If you don’t use it the yeasts that get in and do the job are known as ‘wild yeasts’, which are just pretty much everywhere as part of our environment.
I’m not sure if you can use baking yeast, because I’m sure I’ve seen recipes online that refer to it, but sometimes people post things that they haven’t actually tried, and there could be some misinformation out there. I talked to a guy in a brewing shop who had been brewing beer and wine and who knows what else for decades, he’d read a lot on the subject and was quite knowledgeable. He said the brewing yeast was grown in a very controlled environment, so that it was predictable. I was actually talking to him because we’d made some ginger beer and some of the bottles had started exploding so if you opened one you’d get this pretty awesome geyser of ginger beer shooting out of it. In some cases the bottles actually exploded though, so I really wanted to get that under control. He said that’s partly why, in beer making, they used this special yeast. Because they could control it better. He said that with wild yeasts, they were unpredictable. (It turns out the explosive ginger beer was due to being bottled while there was still too much sugar in the brew, there is a special meter you can get that tells you when you have a low enough sugar level to bottle it.)
My thinking on the whole commercial brewing yeast or wild yeast is this… for centuries vinegar has been brewed without commercial brewing yeast. In fact it was one of the first fermented foods humans ever developed they reckon. It was widely used for preserving and disinfecting things. So naturally fermented apple cider vinegar (or any other fermented food) that has wild yeasts in it is more likely to be the beneficial, probiotic yeast our bodies need. I don’t know much about the commercial brewing yeast but, even though it may ferment the beverage, but doesn’t necessarily have any beneficial probiotics in it. It’s possible that it is a type of yeast that will take over and prevent other (wild) yeasts from establishing themselves as well (this would make its behavior more predictable). Even if it does have some probiotic benefits, I think it’s only one strain of yeast. A wild fermentation may have many different types of yeast, all of which have different benefits.
So I’m not an expert on this (yet), but fermentation and probiotics fascinate me. They are extremely important to our health. My personal philosophy is to try to eat as naturally as possible, and as far as probiotics go to get the widest range of beneficial bacteria and yeast in me as I can. That’s why, even though I’m really into wild fermentation, I also highly recommend the Body Ecology products. They are developed to have a specific group of yeast and bacteria that are beneficial, and they are guaranteed to be active. So you know exactly what you are getting, and what your ferments will contain. Lots of good info on the site as to what the various strains of yeast and bacteria do as well. I haven’t been able to get them where I live yet, but if I could, I would use both the Body Ecology starters and wild fermentation to create my own probiotic foods.
Thanks for your very informative reply. I like your amazing site.
Yeah your right. The best way to live a healthy life is to go natural.
Someone told me that baking yeast should not be used for fermentation. I don’t know for what reason that it should not be used. I believe your method using natural or wild yeast is the best one and the healthiest way to produce apple cider vinegar.
I’m looking forward to making my own apple cider vinegar using your recipe. I’ll let you know if it turns out good.
Thank you Bool! Do post back and let us know how your apple cider vinegar brewing goes. I’d like to try to find some cheap organic apples and make some more. You can sometimes get ‘juicing’ apples for good prices. They are not good-looking enough to be sold for eating, but are great for juicing, often great for drying as well, and are fine for making cider vinegar.
I’ve only ever made the peels and cores version of this. I’d like to try the other version too, just to compare. Let me know which one you try.
I am doing this. It has been a month. I dont have any scum on top, but there is sediment. I made 2. 1 has an odor, and the taste is getting there. The other…same, but not alot of odor or taste.
Hi Vickie. I’m assuming you made them at about the same time, and they are sitting next to each other. Where they
both made from organic apples? I’m not sure why they are different as far as their fermentation process goes. If you can put the one that doesn’t yet have an odor and taste into a wider jar, something where it has more surface area exposed to the air it might help.
Some things that can interfere with fermentation are pesticides, tap water, anti-bacterial soap residue, basically anything designed to kill bacteria (or in the case of pesticides to kill any living thing). So if this batch was exposed to anything like that, which maybe the other batch was not it might be inhibiting the growth of the bacteria. Also excessive heat (that’s basically what pasteurization, another process to kill off micro-organisms, is). At least it’s not smelling bad, so it’s not gone off.
With these ‘wild fermentations’ some of the fermenting bacteria and yeasts will come from the atmosphere (they are all around us all the time), so the other jar may just have received more exposure to these helpful micro-organisms, for some reason. To help the ‘slower’ jar along, you could try putting a bit of ‘starter’ from the jar that’s definitely fermenting into the one that’s not. It may be fermenting but just a bit more slowly, but if you add some from the other jar you’ll introduce the micro-organisms so you know they are there for sure and that should help. It may just take longer for this slower jar to get there, but don’t give up on it (unless it goes bad of course).
I hope some of this helps. Let me know how it goes, how they are doing in a couple more weeks. If you get the slower batch to successfully ferment let us know what you did. I’m sure it will be helpful to other people too. Thanks!
I didnt have organic apples. Just store bought. I was making an apple dessert in the crock pot, not yours at the time, sorry
, so just used what I had on hand. Used the peels and cores and used wide mouth jars. I had them both in a cabinet behind other things with a elastic plastic stretchy lid that I slit holes in. I am new to alot of this. I have used store bought ACV before and came upon your site saying I could make it myself. 
I will keep checking it though. Not like I lost alot if it doesnt turn out!
I’m having trouble with the search function on here. I’m looking for a post from a few weeks ago, but I’m not finding what I’m looking for. Is it accurate? The entry was really something I’d enjoy reading again.
Hi James, the search function should be fairly accurate. Tell me what you were looking for and I’ll see if I can help. What was the article you were looking for about?
I have a thick layer of furry mold on top of mine and my liquid is half gone, (maybe I kept it too warm?). I wouldn’t dare taste this stuff looking like that, did I botch the job? Thanks and God bless!
Hi Megan
Yes, definitely a bad batch. So best to just throw it out and start over. It happened to me once too. I thought at the time that I had let it go too long, but I think there could be several possible causes of mold. If the liquid turns to vinegar quick enough mold won’t have a chance to grow. It can’t grow in the acidic pH of the vinegar. Even if mold spores do land on the liquid, they will die. It could also be caused by a bit of the apple, like a bit of core, sticking up out of the water. It’s hard to say for sure. If it consistently becomes a problem for you, you could try adding a bit of ‘starter’ vinegar to it. I know with Kombucha that’s what you do, and it prevents mold growing on the surface of the sweet tea, which otherwise is a very favorable medium. I’m really not sure how much you would add though.