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retailer—as was probably done in sample 34, which contained
only 1.44 per cent. of acetic acid—then, if the
inspector comes along and takes a sample, the vendor gets
fined. No. 34, for instance, was fined £3 3s. and £1 1s.
costs. In No. 52 there was found only 2.64 per cent. of
acetic acid, and there the vendor was fined 10s. and 12s.
costs. But this bottom-limit of 3 per cent. for the real
acetic acid is much too low, and admits watered vinegars
to the market to the prejudice of the genuine vinegar
brewer. In fact, the use of these watered vinegars by
poor persons who have to pickle a little fish, or meat, or
vegetables, leaves the materials imperfectly preserved,
where a genuine vinegar would have preserved them
perfectly. Often such poor persons have no idea of the
reason why their pickled fish, or meat, or vegetable
goes bad.
This putrescence affects not only the food-materials which
are pickled in order to preserve them; it also affects the
watered vinegar itself, and prevents it from keeping.
Watered vinegar tends to putrify, just as watered beer or
watered wine would do. The result is that manufacturers
who send out watered vinegars, vinegars which are badly
brewed, or vinegars which are brewed below strength, want
some preservative in their vinegars in order to atone for
the lack of acetic acid.
The great preservative used for vinegar has been
sulphuric acid. This is sometimes poured into the finished
vinegar as oil of vitriol; sometimes it is put into the grain
in order to reduce it to a fermentable substance, and the
sulphuric acid, having done its work on the grain, is then
neutralized with lime, so as to form sulphate of lime or
gypsum, which goes into the brewing vat and passes on
into the vinegar. In other cases the mineral gypsum is
put into the vat out of the quarry. In still other cases
the brewer salves over his conscience and saves his pocket
by digging a well into a gypsum quarry and pumping up
the solution of gypsum into his vat. It is regarded as
better to put the gypsum into the vat as "spring water"