Orange Vinegar -- wild culture question

[dhorphuwl]

I recently started soaking things in vinegar and grain alcohol to make flavor extracts and household cleaners. A peculiar culture seems to be emerging on my oranges soaking in vinegar. The oranges are a vaguely bloody valencia variety from a tree in our yard, and I am using just plain old distilled corn vinegar from the Costco. The culture looks and feels similar to a kombucha mother. My guess is it is some kind of aceto-bacteria and yeast. It's been about 2 months since I started the soak and the culture has definitely grown. You can see the little wispy strands going down into the liquid like on kombucha (pictures attached).

My question: anyone have any better guess on what the culture is or what I can do with it?

I am thinking about trying to use it to make vinegar or maybe a kombucha-like drink. Of course, I don't know if it is safe for producing a consumable product or what kind of medium would be appropriate (aside from orange juice maybe (?)). Maybe I can divide up the culture and try it in several different liquids. If anyone has any suggestions, it would be greatly appreciated. Or maybe suggest a contact who can help with identification?

[Tim Hall]

It looks like a SCOBY (mother) to me. I say give it a test run in making vinegar and see what happens.

If you've got a lot of vinegar in that mix, it's highly unlikely you've got anything bad. If the scoby has some structure to it, and takes a little effort to "tear" apart (as apposed to something just slimy that falls apart or dissolves) it's a cellulose structure that indicates some kind of acetic acid bacteria (maybe vinegar, maybe kombucha, maybe both). That looks like the kind of thing I wouldn't hesitate to experiment with.

[dhorphuwl]

Thanks for your reply. The liquid is pure white distilled vinegar (I guess 5% solution), although the orange peels probably upped the water percentage a tad. The mass definitely has pretty much the exact same structure as my kombucha mothers, pretty tough.

I guess I'm going to try to make some vinegar! Maybe I'll try it with an orange juice mixture since I believe this culture came from the orange peels.

Culturing is so fun and fascinating! Opens up a whole new world of possibilities!