Fruit, sugar, and vinegar come together into a concentrated syrup that can be diluted with sparkling water for a bright, not-too-sweet drink.

Ingredients

• 2 cups fresh or frozen marionberries
• 1 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup Pome Marionberry Apple Cider Vinegar

Method

1. Place the marionberries and sugar in a bowl.
2. Crush the berries gently with a fork and stir until the fruit is thoroughly coated.
3. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
4. The next day, stir in the Marionberry Pome.
5. Strain through a fine mesh strainer, pressing gently on the fruit to extract the liquid.
6. Transfer the shrub to a clean bottle or jar and keep refrigerated.

To serve

1. Add 1 to 2 tablespoons shrub to a tall glass filled with ice.
2. Top with 6 to 8 ounces sparkling water and stir.
3. Taste and add more shrub if you like it sharper.

A small amount of good vinegar in cold sparkling water creates a dry, refreshing drink with far more character than flavored seltzer.

Makes one drink

Ingredients

• 8 to 12 ounces very cold sparkling water
• 1 to 2 teaspoons Pome Bittersweet Apple Cider Vinegar
• Ice
• Thin apple slice, optional

Method

1. Fill a tall glass with ice.
2. Add 1 teaspoon Pome and pour in the sparkling water.
3. Stir gently and taste.
4. Add more Pome a little at a time until the balance is where you want it.
5. Garnish with a thin slice of apple if you like.

That is it. Vinegar is highly acidic, so always dilute it rather than drinking it straight.

The important rule first: always dilute

POME is bottled undiluted and is stronger than most commercial apple cider vinegar. Do not drink it straight.

The acidity that makes vinegar useful is the same acidity that makes it harsh at full strength. Undiluted vinegar of any brand can damage tooth enamel and irritate the throat. Diluted properly, that is not a concern.

A standard measure for drinking is one tablespoon in 8 to 12 ounces of water. If you are new to it, start with a teaspoon and work up. Rinse your mouth with plain water afterwards.

When to drink it

There is no settled best time, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing with more confidence than the evidence supports. What follows is what people actually report doing.

In the morning, before eating. A common habit. Something sour on an empty stomach does not suit everyone, so if it does not sit well, take it with food instead.

With meals. Easier on the stomach for most people, and it doubles as part of the meal rather than a separate ritual.

Not immediately before lying down. Acidic liquid and a horizontal position are a poor combination if you are prone to reflux. Leave an hour.

Making it taste better

Diluted vinegar is sour and a little bitter. Some people take to that immediately. If you do not, it improves with company.

• Honey. A teaspoon rounds off the sharp edge. A dark honey stands up to the Bittersweet particularly well.
• Warm water. Turns it into more of a tonic than a cold drink. Better in winter.
• Sparkling water. Over ice, with a squeeze of lemon, it becomes something close to a shrub.
• Ginger. Freshly grated, for warmth. It suits the deeper expressions.

In the kitchen

This is where the quality of the vinegar shows most plainly.

• Vinaigrette. One part acid to three parts oil. A tablespoon of POME, three tablespoons of good olive oil, a teaspoon of Dijon, salt and pepper. Make a jar of it and keep it.
• Marinades. The acidity tenderises and the apple character adds depth. Good with chicken, pork and lamb.
• Braises. A splash near the end lifts the whole pot.
• Quick pickles. Better than white vinegar with red onion, shallot and root vegetables.
• Pan sauces. Deglaze with it. The acid cuts through the fat.

Start with about half what a recipe asks for. This is stronger than the vinegar most recipes were written around.

The Barrel Aged, specifically

The Barrel Aged wants using differently. It is deeper and more concentrated, and it works best as a finishing ingredient rather than a cooking one, in the way you would reach for an aged balsamic.

• Over roasted vegetables, right before they go to the table.
• A few drops on an aged cheese board.
• Stirred into beans or lentils at the last moment.
• Over vanilla ice cream. We are serious. The oak and apple work with cream.

What not to do

Do not drink it straight. Worth repeating, because people still do.

Do not treat it as medicine. Vinegar is food. We make no claims about what it treats or prevents, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does.

Do not overdo it. More is not better. The risks of heavy use, enamel erosion and digestive irritation, are real and they scale with quantity. A tablespoon a day is a sensible ceiling for most people.

Do not use it undiluted in your mouth. As a rinse or a gargle at full strength it will do your enamel no favours at all.

If you are pregnant, immunocompromised or managing a medical condition, talk to your healthcare provider before making any vinegar a daily habit.

POME is raw, undiluted, and made in Forest Grove, Oregon. Always dilute before drinking. Available in 8 and 16 ounce bottles.

Bittersweet cider vinegar brings acidity and tannin alongside rosemary, garlic, and olive oil in a simple marinade for lamb chops or a small leg of lamb.

Makes enough for about 2 pounds of lamb

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 3 tablespoons Pome Bittersweet Apple Cider Vinegar
• 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Method

1. Whisk all of the ingredients together.
2. Pour over the lamb and turn to coat well. Cover and refrigerate for 1 to 3 hours.
3. Remove the lamb from the marinade and cook using your preferred method.

Finish the cooked lamb with a few drops of fresh Bittersweet vinegar just before serving if you want the apple character to come forward. The same marinade works well with pork or duck.

That changed in the twentieth century.

The industrial revolution in vinegar

In the 1930s the German engineer Heinrich Frings developed submerged fermentation, a way of making vinegar with industrial aeration. The idea was straightforward. If acetic acid bacteria need oxygen to convert alcohol into acetic acid, pump air through the liquid and make the whole thing go as fast as possible.

The Frings acetator transformed the industry. A process that had taken weeks or months could be finished in a day or two. Yield improved sharply, consistency became achievable at scale, and the economics were hard to argue with. Today the overwhelming majority of commercial vinegar, including nearly all mass market apple cider vinegar, is made this way.

What surface fermentation looks like

Before the acetator, vinegar was made on the surface. The process runs like this:

1. Hard cider goes into open or partly open vessels.
2. Acetic acid bacteria colonise the surface of the liquid from the air.
3. They form a film, the mother, that floats on top.
4. Over weeks, the bacteria slowly convert the alcohol to acetic acid.
5. The process finishes when the alcohol is exhausted.

This is still how traditional balsamic is made in Modena and Reggio Emilia, how Orleans method wine vinegar is made, and how small cider vinegar producers work. It is slow, it takes up a great deal of space, and it needs far more time and labour than the industrial route.

Why the method matters

Temperature. Industrial aeration generates real heat, and many operations run warm on purpose to keep bacterial activity high. Surface fermentation happens at or near ambient temperature, which preserves volatile aromatic compounds that heat drives off.

Time. Speed and character tend to pull against each other in fermented food, and vinegar is no exception. A slow conversion leaves room for the secondary reactions that build complexity. Fast aeration produces acetic acid very efficiently and not much else.

Aeration. Forcing air through the liquid exposes the entire batch to oxygen at once, with a good deal of turbulence. Surface fermentation exposes it gradually, through the film, which is gentler on the tannin and the aromatics that came in with the fruit.

The mother. In surface fermentation the mother forms by itself, because it is the bacteria building their own raft. In industrial production the bacteria stay suspended and no raft forms. A mother can be added back afterwards, and some producers do, but that is not the same as one that was never removed.

What this means for POME

We use the slow Orleans method. Once the alcoholic fermentation is finished, the cider goes into vessels and acetification happens over weeks at ambient temperature. Which means:

• We make far less vinegar per unit of time than an industrial operation of the same footprint.
• Our flavour varies more between batches, which we manage by tasting and blending rather than by standardising.
• The mother forms naturally and stays in the bottle.
• The tannin and aromatics from the fruit come through more intact.

We take those trade offs deliberately. The constraint is also the point: you cannot rush this without changing what comes out.

One misconception worth clearing up

Industrial acetification is sometimes described as aerating the vinegar, which sounds like the pleasant thing you do to a glass of wine. It is not that. It is force oxygenating a liquid at speed, often warm, to get as much bacterial throughput as possible. The endpoint is the same acetic acid. The path is not, and the path is where everything else is either kept or lost.

Is traditional always better?

No, and we would rather say so.

Industrial vinegar is consistent, safe and efficient. For pickling, for cleaning, for cooking where the vinegar is a background acid, it does the job perfectly well and costs a fraction of what ours does.

What the slow method preserves is the complexity that comes from a gentler conversion. If vinegar is a commodity ingredient to you, the production method is not worth paying for. If it is an ingredient you taste, in the way you would taste the difference between a good olive oil and a cooking oil, then it is. POME is made for the second case.

POME is made by the slow Orleans method, not industrial aeration, and bottled undiluted with the mother intact.

After searing meat or mushrooms, the browned bits on the bottom are the beginning of the sauce. Barrel Aged Pome loosens them from the pan, then reduces into something glossy, savory, and concentrated.

Makes enough for 2 to 4 servings

Ingredients

• 1 small shallot, finely minced
• 2 tablespoons Pome Barrel Aged Apple Cider Vinegar
• 1/2 cup chicken, beef, vegetable, or mushroom stock
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon cold unsalted butter
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

1. After cooking your meat or mushrooms, transfer them from the skillet and reduce the heat to medium.
2. Add the shallot and cook in the fat remaining in the pan until softened.
3. Add the Barrel Aged Pome and scrape the bottom of the skillet with a wooden spoon to release the browned bits.
4. Let the vinegar reduce by roughly half.
5. Add the stock and mustard and continue cooking until the sauce lightly coats a spoon.
6. Remove from the heat and swirl in the cold butter.
7. Taste, season, and spoon immediately over the finished dish.

It sounds unappetising. It is completely harmless, entirely natural, and it tells you something useful about how the vinegar was made.

What it actually is

The mother is a colony of acetic acid bacteria, mostly species of the genus Acetobacter, together with the cellulose they produce.

Those bacteria are what turn alcohol into acetic acid, the compound that makes vinegar sour. During surface fermentation they colonise the top of the liquid and build a floating raft, a biofilm held together by bacterial cellulose. That raft is the mother.

As fermentation continues it can grow substantial, thick and leathery and cloudy. In traditional vinegar houses a piece of the mother is often carried into the next batch as a starter, passing the culture forward from one batch to the next across years.

Why it looks the way it does

It is largely bacterial cellulose, a structure the bacteria build for themselves. That is the same kind of material, though not the same organism, that forms the gel in kombucha. It is dense enough to float, slightly translucent, and it ranges from thin and stringy to thick and leathery depending on how long fermentation ran and under what conditions.

In a bottle it usually settles to the bottom over time, so you may find it as sediment, or as a floating mass, depending on how the bottle has been handled.

Why most commercial vinegar does not have it

Most commercial apple cider vinegar is filtered before bottling. Filtering takes out the mother and any suspended solids, which gives a clearer and more uniform product that looks the same on the shelf for longer. That is a reasonable commercial decision and it is why the vinegar most people grew up with is bright and clear.

Industrial submerged fermentation also produces less cohesive mother in the first place. Because the bacteria are suspended throughout the liquid rather than forming a raft on the surface, what they build is more dispersed and largely disappears in filtration.

Some producers add mother back into filtered vinegar afterwards. It can look similar in the bottle. The production history behind it is not the same.

Why we leave it in

POME is made by surface fermentation. The mother forms during acetification and stays in the bottle, unfiltered. Two reasons.

First, filtering costs something. Every time you push vinegar through a filter you lose volatile compounds along with the solids.

Second, the mother is evidence. A bottle with visible mother tells you the vinegar was fermented the old way, that the bacteria built their own structure rather than being driven through the liquid under pressure. It is a visible sign of an unprocessed product, which is difficult to fake and easy to check.

How to handle it

• Shake before use. It settles. A gentle shake puts it back through the bottle.
• It is edible. You can drink it without concern. It has almost no flavour of its own and tastes mainly of vinegar.
• It may grow. Leave an open bottle for a while and you may see new mother forming at the surface. That is the culture carrying on. It is not spoilage.
• If you would rather not have it in the glass, pour through a small strainer. The vinegar underneath is unchanged.

What the mother is not

It is not mould, not contamination, and not a sign that anything has gone wrong. Spoilage in vinegar is rare, because most organisms cannot survive at that acidity in the first place.

If your bottle has visible mother, that is exactly what it should look like.

POME is raw, unfiltered and bottled with the mother intact. It is a living product, made by living organisms.

Sharp aged cheese, ripe fruit, and a few drops of Marionberry Pome create the same kind of sweet, salty, acidic balance that makes a good cheese course work.

Serves 2 to 4

Ingredients

• 4 ounces aged cheddar or firm aged sheep’s milk cheese
• 1 ripe but firm pear
• 2 teaspoons Pome Marionberry Apple Cider Vinegar
• Small handful toasted walnuts or hazelnuts
• Freshly ground black pepper, optional

Method

1. Bring the cheese to room temperature.
2. Slice the pear just before serving and arrange it with pieces of cheese on a plate.
3. Scatter the toasted nuts around the plate.
4. Drizzle the Marionberry Pome lightly over the pear and cheese. A few drops in each bite are enough.
5. Finish with a small turn of black pepper if you like.
6. Eat the cheese, fruit, and vinegar together.

That distinction matters. Instead of disappearing into the cooking process, a few drops of Barrel Aged Pome hit the hot carrots at the end, where the vinegar’s aroma and acidity remain vivid.

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 pounds carrots
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 1 to 2 tablespoons Pome Barrel Aged Apple Cider Vinegar
• 1 tablespoon chopped parsley
• Flaky sea salt, optional

Method

1. Heat the oven to 425°F.
2. Cut the carrots lengthwise if large. Toss with olive oil, salt, and black pepper.
3. Spread them on a sheet pan and roast until deeply browned at the edges and tender in the center, about 25 to 35 minutes.
4. Transfer the hot carrots to a serving dish.
5. While they are still steaming, drizzle with 1 tablespoon Barrel Aged Pome and toss.
6. Taste before adding more. The goal is not to make the carrots taste vinegary. It is to make the carrots taste more like themselves.
7. Finish with parsley and flaky salt.

Keep a jar in the refrigerator for tacos, grain bowls, sandwiches, beans, salads, eggs, and roasted vegetables.

Makes one small jar

Ingredients

• 1 medium red onion
• 1/2 cup Pome Bittersweet Apple Cider Vinegar, minimum 5% acidity
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher or pickling salt

Method

1. Wash and sanitize a heat-safe glass jar.
2. Peel the onion and slice it very thinly. Pack the slices into the jar.
3. Combine the Pome, water, sugar, and salt in a small saucepan. Bring just to a simmer, stirring until the sugar and salt dissolve.
4. Pour the hot brine over the onions until they are submerged.
5. Allow the jar to cool, cover, and refrigerate.
6. Let the onions pickle for several hours before serving. They are even better the following day.

This is a refrigerator pickle. Keep it refrigerated. It is not intended for shelf-stable canning.