Fermentation Takes Time - July 2025 Update
From the desk of Sam Reese, Director of Operations
Far and away, the most frequent question that Red Truck Orchards seems to be fielding these days is when can I buy your vinegar!? Whether from shoppers at the farmers market, U-Pick visitors at our home orchard (Hallstedt Homestead Cherries), or via our website and social media accounts, y'all just keep buying out whatever we can bottle up. We're thrilled, and we're also doing everything we can to make more!
While constantly being out of stock is one of the better problems for a business to have, it's still a problem.
But like anything in the vinegar world, progress is slow, steady, and at the mercy of trillions of little microbes who have spent millions of years doing things at their own pace. And that pace is...well...leisurely.
Red Truck Orchards isn't a giant commodity production by Big Ag; we're a family-owned company in our infancy. Just last year, we were making tiny batches of vinegar in 5 gallon buckets out of a rented kitchen — just to prove to ourselves that it could be done (and that it could be delicious). With proof of a promising concept in hand and a groundswell of demand at our backs, we spent the winter retrofitting an old pole barn into a clean, modern, fully-licensed vinegar production facility. It seems like a completely different era, but I hung that license up on the wall less than 6 months ago. What's happened in the interim is the best possible answer I can give to explain why it hasn't been raining cherry vinegar all day every day across the Leelanau Peninsula, and why soon — very soon — that's all about to change.
We make our own vinegar. From scratch. That is to say: we ferment our vinegar here, on site, at that aforementioned pole-barn-turned-vinegar-factory.
We don't buy cheap, bulk vinegar and "infuse" it with cherries. We start with whole, pitted sweet and tart cherries, ferment it into our top secret, family recipe cherry wine, and inoculate that wine with our own, homegrown mother cultures to complete a second fermentation that transforms that wine into cherry vinegar. (You can read more about the mother, what it is, and why it's important in our "Vinegar 101: What is a vinegar mother?" blog post.) It's a true-origin, traditionally made, honest-to-goodness product that we control from start to finish. We love it; we're proud of it; and we might be a little too obsessed with doing things our own way. And that's the way we like it.
As you can imagine, this process takes a bit of time. In particular, vinegar fermentation — the part of the process where our acetic acid bacteria mother cultures metabolize our cherry wine into cherry vinegar — is a time-intensive step. Acetobacter are finnicky little microorganisms, and they need everything to be just right — temperature, moisture, airflow, and so on — in order to efficiently and consistently yield a high-quality vinegar. Try to rush the process, and the bacteria will say no thanks and fall into a dormant state until their conditions are made more favorable.
Moreover, because we grow our own mother of vinegar cultures here on site — in lieu of sourcing them from another manufacturer, supplier, or commercial laboratory — it has taken a good while to build up a adequate stock of happy, healthy bacteria to successfully ferment the larger batches our new facility can produce. For reference, our batches here in Northport are 60 times larger than our previous batches. Scaling up that bacterial stock is a little like making a sourdough starter — insofar as you need a decent volume of vinegar mother in order to safely and successfully inoculate the wine — but unlike sourdoughs, which mature in a day or two, each step in growing and expanding a mother culture takes 4 to 8 weeks.
To illustrate, we started the process of growing our cultures in one gallon batches. 4 to 8 weeks later, we had enough healthy vinegar-in-process — each containing a live and active mother — to start a handful of 5 gallon batches, using the one gallon batches as our bacterial inoculant. Following that pattern, those five gallon batches eventually became 20-25 gallons. Then 100. Then 300-350 gallons, the capacity of our vinegar tanks here at Red Truck Orchards in Northport. That's where all the time has gone, and along the way, we learned, iterated, and yes, on occasion, failed. But today, as I'm writing this blog post, all of our tanks are full of actively fermenting vinegar, pushing slowly but surely each day toward full metabolic conversion: a series of laboratory and sensory specifications that tell us the cherry vinegar is finished, of acceptable quality, and ready for packaging and shipping.
As of last week, the first of these full-size batches was bottled up, with many more on its heels.
Now that we have more experience with production timelines and batch intervals, we can better forecast and prepare for where those bottles wind up. That means more inventory at markets, fewer stock-outs, and an ability to service retail partners: grocery and specialty stores; bars and restaurants; and consistent inventory for online purchasing via e-commerce.
I've been in the fermentation business for almost two decades; it's not an industry for the impatient. Good fermented things take time, and more often than not, rushing those natural, microbial processes yields a substandard product. Our mothers are comprised of trillions of little bacterial cells, all of which have had one primary biological function for longer than humans have walked the earth: turning alcohol into vinegar. They're not about to say how high when we tell them to jump. We're at the mercy of their prehistoric schedule, and respect for that schedule is the best way I've learned to yield their best, most delicious results.