Flavor Profile: Medium Sweetness, high acidity

Tasting Notes: Floral, sweet, and whimsical. You’ll get raspberries, honey, cotton candy, peaches and grapefruit peel.

Kitchen Pairings: Anything sweet. No, really, anything. Light fruits (Melons, pears, etc) are a simple and easy pairing, but this will enhance anything sweet you want to have more complexity. 

Bar Pairings: See above: works incredibly well with more floral or sweeter gins, vodka, sparkling wines, and as an acidulant for aperitifs. 

The Idea: This is a passion project, plain and simple. Chesapeake Trout Lilies are a fascinating plant. Originally Scottish by origin, the flowers were brought to the US where they eventually acclimated to the Chesapeake Bay Area, forming colonies along the Potomac and the bay itself. The plants grow in thick clusters, but while a single square foot may contain as many as over 40 different plants in their thickest populations, only one in ten of the plants, on average, yields a bloom. Therefore, in order to sustainably forage the flowers that are used in making this vinegar; only one flower per group of forty plants may be harvested.  

As you’d expect; this makes the process of making this vinegar in any worthwhile quantity extremely laborious and to just produce enough to release 70 bottles of the vinegar has taken 4 years of foraging, brewing, aging, and repeating that process. That being said, the result is incredible. The vinegar has some more classic floral notes; honey, elderflower, raspberries, and the like, but also citrus tones like grapefruit, complex, fun flavors like bubblegum and cotton candy, and even flavors you wouldn’t expect like bananas.

This is a vinegar for hardcore foodies, chefs, bartenders, and die-hard vinegar lovers. If you’re looking for a gift to really stun a foodie friend with; this is what you should be getting them.