There are a lot of apple peels left over after making sauce, pie fillings, and dried apples. The last two years we just composted them, but this year we figured we'd make use of them by making vinegar. We use vinegar for cleaning (including conditioning my hair), cooking, preserving, and I even found ideas of using it for making your skin soft. It wouldn't cost us anything to make, and it was easy enough, so we went for it. Using a 5-gallon bucket, we put all the peels in (no peels with black spots or rotten areas). Put a plate over that to keep the peels down and then put another weight (we used a canning jar full of water) to keep the plate down. You don't want anything floating around and get exposed to the air. Cover it in water and put in a place where it can remain undisturbed. We had our bucket in the cold storage room. After about 6 weeks or so we brought it back up and stored it in sterilized canning jars. We had a successful first attempt and I'm certain we'll be doing this again next year.
We used a funnel with cheese cloth in it to filter, and just put it in a used gallon container, and then started filling up a few mason jars. On the left, you can see the green 5-gallon bucket on full of vinegar. On the right side, you can see that we were also making laundry detergent.
By the end of November, we had our own home made vinegar.
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