Michigan Cherry Vinegar: As Sweet (and Sour) As Cherry Pie

In Northern Michigan, throughout Grand Traverse County, July is the high time for cherry season (note: the 100th year of the National Cherry Festival is next year!), leading to a glut of cherry-everything from pies to paraphernalia. But after you make your pies, jams, salsas and barbecue sauces, stocking your freezer full with a stockpile of sweet Balatons and Montmorency tarts, what’s there to do other than make cherry vinegar, right?!

A handful of years ago, while in Traverse City one Saturday morning at the Sara Hardy Farmers Market, I came across a small stand selling vinegars. Sean Niemisto, who brewed beer for Short’s at the time, had started this little vinegar company called Niems as a side hustle, highlighting regional berries via bright bottles of acetic acid. One was an electric red cherry vinegar. Sadly, Niems is no more (Niemisto now has his plate full as the head cider maker at Tandem), but two more vinegar companies have followed in its footsteps putting local fruit to use in bright bountiful vinegars.

The first, Donkey Provisions, only recently released its aged cherry vinegar, blending tart and black cherries for a nuanced, balanced result. Unfortunately, it was received so well that this year’s bottling has already sold out! Jeff Kane’s pastoral land at Harpers Ridge Farms on the Old Mission Peninsula, is more than a passion project — he bought the property a few years ago, and on twenty acres or so, replete with chicken, sheep and the company’s namesake donkeys, he’s been finding vinegar to be the failsafe. “We make one cider, one wine — and have a couple hundred [fruit-bearing] plants — mostly for vinegar,” Kane states; he also has one Arbequina olive tree growing in a greenhouse.

The herd of donkeys has become a main attraction at the farm, with school field trips and church groups coming to tour the land; the donkeys have also become unintentional mascots for Kane’s vinegar venture. Kane came into vinegar after making other sorts of fermentations, including beer, hard ciders, and perries while living in Chicago working in software development.

When he and his family decided to buy the farm and move to Michigan, Kane saw that under cottage laws he could make and sell vinegars easier than alcohol, so he surveyed the property for fruit. First he made an apple cider vinegar, then a fire cider came second, and most recently, he launched the cherry vinegar.

“I’ve got some black cherries, but they're mostly Montmorency tarts,” says Kane. “They came in at 17 brix right off the tree,” which means he didn’t need to add any sugar. He jumpstarted the fermentation with a Montrachet yeast that’s usually used to make high alcohol red wines. “It maintains the flavor of the cherry, and makes the liquid darker,” Kane observes. Off an acre of land, Kane’s brings in three totes (of cherries) of his own, about 10,000 pounds, but needed more for next year’s batch because of demand. He bought an additional 6700 pounds from a neighbor a couple miles down the road.

“Everything starts in steel,” notes Kane, who works with 100-200 liter open-top fermenters he keeps at a facility in downtown Traverse City. But he’s also making some small-batch stuff that he ages in the basement of his 1901 farmhouse basement. “It’s a natural root cellar," Kane quips. The first batch of cherry vinegar was 250-300 gallons and took three years to make, but “that’s not sustainable," admits Kane.  That said, it's an excellent product worth waiting for, and emblematic of his agricultural surroundings.

Another fellow Northern Michigander, Phil Hallstedt of Red Truck Orchards and Hallstedt Homestead Cherries, saw that Traverse City’s cherry culture was in jeopardy, and decided to help growers, such as himself, find secondary markets for their fruit. “Cherry harvest was devastating this year, we lost 70% of our crop, some tarts didn’t even shake,” says Hallstedt, and this on the heels of a sweet cherry shortage last year.

Hallstedt and his wife grew up in Grand Rapids, but careers in pharmaceuticals took them to Lilly in Indianapolis. He spent nearly 40 years in new product development, but yearned for the Up North lifestyle, eventually moving onto a 53-acre estate with barren orchards. “I looked at hops, but there was a niche for fresh cherries,” Hallstedt reflects. Even with a U-Pick option available, harvesting by hand wasn’t so economical, so Hallstedt sought a value-added product to supplement the business.

Synergistically, Hallstedt had just been introduced to drinking vinegars by his children. “My children brought me some shrubs a few years ago, using apple cider vinegar as a base,” says Hallstedt. After tasting them,he and his wife agreed that it was  too harsh and acidic and masked all of the other flavors in the shrubs. Hallstedt had been making a dry cherry wine for the past 10 years with 50 gallons sitting around in a barrel. “What would happen if I turn that into vinegar?” he wondered, thinking cherry vinegar-based shrubs would be superlative.

“It’s the full cherry, without the pit,” says Hallstedt, pointing out that many cherry vinegars on the market are made from cherry concentrate mixed with white wine vinegar. Red Truck’s version has a long, lingering finish, great for salad dressing, pork, and duck. It’s a real 360 product, Hallstedt tells me. “One can walk the orchard, pick the cherries, and see the vinegar being made.”. The water comes from a well that reaches  407 feet down into a Great Lakes aquifer. And to make it more cherry-y, all of the vinegar is aged in cherrywood. 

Hallstedt thinks about his cherry vinegar’s applications holistically too — his piquant bottles of ruby red elixir are good for what ails you “Cherry vinegar has 3-20 [depending on the cherry variety] times more antioxidants than apple cider vinegar,” Hallstedt says, citing trials that show cherry vinegar might help those with type 2 diabetes by controlling post-meal glucose spikes. Hallstedt believes it also helps with rheumatoid arthritis, weight loss, heartburn and acid reflux, too.  “It’s weird to take acid to treat acid, but vinegar regulates the stomach’s production of acid — food instead of pill.” he says. While gut health may be top of mind for Hallstedt, Red Truck’s slushie machine is often what people fixate on at the farmers market.  “Everyone loves lemonade — a touch of cherry vinegar makes it more complex, interesting — we call it a shrubie.” However you have it, cherry vinegar could be Traverse City’s cure all!