Vinegar salts

[Bolverk]

Howdy all,

Diving back into the Cousins process for high ester rums and I started thinking....

Has anyone tried using regular distilled white vinegar, hitting it with CaO to get it to precipitate out the acid salts, dehydrating that and adding it back to a retort/thumper with a high alcohol solution like heads or high tails with sulfuric acid like in the Cousins process?
If so what were your results?

I suppose it would just be easier at this point to use straight acetic acid, but I'm curious...

Thanks in advance
B

[Bolverk]

Well in the absence of a response I'm doing it...

Distilled 5% white vinegar .5g (1.89l) staring pH 2.53.
I added 6 tsp CaO, this gave me a pH 11+. I over shot my target of 8, I should have stopped at 4 scoops and let it marry a before taking taking my next pH reading... oh well, lesson learned for next time.

I put it on the stove medium heat and slowly increased the heat until it started to just barely boil. I got a bit of a foam up at hot break and I skimmed off the foam. Its now reducing.

Interestingly enough all the vinegar smell is gone... it tracks with what I've read about stabilizing the acids until you can re-acidify the salt later.

[Bolverk]

I checked it every 5-10 mins or so to give it a quick stir, it starts to develop an almost meringue like cap that I knocked back down. Once the volume in the pot got down to about 1/3 I started getting a little worried that it was going to scorch in the pan. So I poured the remaining slurry in a glass dish and put in the oven at 300f to dehydrate the remaining water. Overall its probably taken 5-6 hours but is back to a powder.

Having done this I better understand what to expect once I've collected a fair amount of lees (retort stillage) so I can do this again.

What I dont know and haven't read yet is if they repeatedly recycle this lime over and over again into other salts batches.