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undergo the alcoholic fermentation. For beer, the alcoholic
liquid is bittered and preserved as such; but for vinegar,
the alcoholic liquid is subjected to a secondary fermentation.
By this means nearly the whole of the alcohol is
converted into acetic acid. Malt vinegar, in fact, is a beer
which, instead of having been bittered, has been scientifically
soured. As beer may be brewed from a sweetwort
which is rich or poor, and may be anything from the
strongest ale to the poorest small beer—according to the
percentage of alcohol which it contains, so vinegar may
be brewed to contain various percentages of acetic acid.
The materials from which vinegars should be produced
are three—the malt, the water, and the yeast.
As to the yeast, it is used in order to make the sugar
of the sweetwort ferment into alcohol. No practical
question arises over the yeast.
As to the water, large questions arise. Here, I submit,
as a governing principle, that no one ought to manufacture
an article of food for public sale with any water other
than a good drinking water. If, in order to save a waterrate,
water from unsafe surface wells be used in dairies,
experience shows that typhoid fever is often disseminated
among those who consume the milk. Such water is
inadmissible as a medium for the preparation or manufacture
of food. If, again, a vinegar manufacturer wishes to
put gypsum into his vinegar, that is "a foreign ingredient,"
and—unless shown to be necessary for the manufacture
or preservation of the vinegar — the introduction of
gypsum is an adulteration. It may be urged that the
amount of vinegar drunk at any one time is so small that
the gypsum taken into the system cannot be injurious
to health. In the case of vinegar this is probably true,
and the same might be said as to the sale of vitriol and
water as vinegar. But this use of gypsum in white wines
and pale ales has become a serious and systematic adulteration—an
adulteration which produces a large amount of
gout and rheumatism, and of other degenerations of tissue
which prematurely age and cripple the consumers of such