Vinegar Mother

My root beer grew a mushroom! This summer I made some black raspberry root beer and had the brilliant idea of corking it. Actually I was out of crown caps, but that is beside the point. I put the extra in some wine bottles, corked them, and stuck them in a cooler to carbonate. A few days later the corks had blown off. I left the open bottles in the cooler and sort of forgot about them. Today, several months later, I was cleaning my studio and found the cooler. The root beer had fermented, probably to the point of being decently alcoholic. Or at least it smelled that way. I dumped one of the bottles in the grass, and lo and behold two 'mushrooms' came out! I got really excited and went to check the other bottle. Sure enough, that one had a mushroom too.

I read somewhere that you can make 'vinegar mushrooms' with leftover wine fruit/pulp. I'm guessing my mushroom was a vinegar mushroom, grown in my root beer "wine" (sugar, blackberry juice, yeast). So my project for the next while is to see how I can make vinegar out of my new baby mushroom.