Grandmothers the world round (or at least mine) know that apple cider vinegar is a cure-all that gives eternal life. I remember shots of it being consumed in the kitchen from an early age, but I never could get past that stong smell and develop a taste for straight-up vinegar. 

Luckily for me, there's an easy way to make vinegar taste awesome: by turning it into a drinking vinegar, also known as a shrub. (For a detailed discussion of what makes a shrub a shrub, check out this Serious Eats post. It's not essential for a shrub to contain vinegar, but in our case, it does.)

So how do you make a vinegar worth enjoying? Easy. Just add some fruit for flavor and a decent amount of sugar. We'll walk through the process in a moment. 

A historical digression:

I'm coming at this from the oposite direction of colonial Americans, who also happened to be really into shrubs. They wanted to preserve summer fruit long after the harvest, whereas I'm looking for a way to use up all the vinegar I'm going to make from Soma's extensive stash of hard cider. 

As a reminder, vinegar is what you get when wine/beer/alcohol meets a very special kind of bacteria that eats alcohol. Acetobacter convert the ethanol into acetic acid, which, as it turns out, is an even better preservative than alcohol. Apple cider vinegar, our base for the shrub, is just hard apple cider that's been converted into vinegar. 

How to make it:

1. Get some fruit. I'm using mulberries, but frozen berries would definitely work well. We're doing 1 cup of berries: 1 cup of apple cider vinegar.

2. Heat the fruit + vinegar for about 5 minutes. It'll simmer a bit and the color will change.

Before:

After:

Apologies for that crappy photo. The color is different, I promise. 

3. Put in a jar to cool, then leave on the counter for three days. 

4. After three days, strain out the berries, then boil the liquid with sugar until it thickens. I used 1/2 cup sugar for 1 cup of vinegar, but I really like sweet things, so adjust accordingly.

5. Cool the thickened syrup, cover, and store in your fridge. 

I took this method from Cook Local. There's also a cold maceration method, which Serious Eats says gets more fruit flavor into the vinegar, but I'm lazy and this way was super easy. 

What to do with it:

Add seltzer! I did about a 6:1 seltzer to syrup ratio, and woah: it was way better than I expected. The vinegar smell is still pretty strong, but it tastes lovely, like a slightly tangy and super delicious soda. The berry flavor's not quite as strong as I would like, but the color's great. 

You can also add booze, of course. 

There's lots more experimentation to come, and I'm always looking for new flavor combos (herbs + fruit) and methods, so let us know if you've experimented and what you like best! If you're not totally sold on making your own, you can easily pick up Pok Pok's high-quality version online.