The internet often inspires my experiments that lead me to wonderful places. Today it was JohnnyKyunghwo inspiring this habanero cheong destined to become vinegar.

He has appeared in my youtube feed a lot recently and he makes all of these cheongs, Korean fruit syrups made by combining 1:1 fruit and sugar. These syrups he makes always seem much stronger in flavor than even pure fruit juice so I have decided to try my hand at using the technique to make flavor syrups for flavored sugar wines. I ferment a ton of things, dairy products, hot sauces, kilju, kimchi, lacto fermented vegetables, sauerkraut, etc so naturally this is where I would gravitate to.

Today he inspired me to make a pure habanero cheong that once finished I will dilute with some spring water and ferment with some ale yeast from another project to make a kilju (sugar wine, I don't like calling sugar based wine wine, and the Finns have a word for exactly this so I like using it instead), then add some mother of vinegar to finally convert it to a (hopefully) spicy and flavorful vinegar to use in future hot sauces in place of just plain white vinegar, or just use wherever I think it might fit in a recipe.

The recipe for above was simply enough 250g coarsely chopped habanero pepper flesh(stemmed, seeded, and internal ribs removed) and 250g pure cane sugar. I opted to make it in the final 1/2 gallon fermentation vessel so I don't have to deal with transferring sugar syrup that ants will go crazy over if I spill even a drop. Didn't even take a day to fully liquefy the sugar, gonna let it rest at least another week until the next step.

Will this work? I have absolutely no idea, but that won't stop me from trying and it already smells amazing so things are looking up!

Tomorrow I am starting on a 4lb pineapple 4lb mango cheong that will become a 5.5 gallon batch of kilju(hopefully) and I am doing it in the traditional Finn way of brewing it in a bucket, albeit a high tech temperature controlled bucket, but it is still a bucket!