Reading their website, small-batch, artisanal vinegar maker Keepwell Vinegar seems more like a farmers market than a fermentation production. Flavors like heirloom tomato, celery leaf, Granny Smith, and Aronia berry jump off the page, the vinegar almost more fit for a field than a bottle.
This is exactly what Isaiah Billington and Sarah Conezio, founders of Keepwell, want: to reflect the seasons, growers, and fields around them through vinegar.
Isaiah and Sarah started Keepwell in 2015 after meeting in a restaurant in Baltimore, MD. (They describe Keepwell as being run by, “two former pastry chefs who decided to start pushing sugar in a different way.”)
“Our generation of cooks grew up when the restaurant industry wanted to pull everything in house,” Isaiah explained. “One of our lasting impressions is that some things don’t make sense to produce in a restaurant environment. Vinegar takes a long time to ferment and frankly, takes up a lot of space while doing it.’
“But there’s no reason that… a restaurant that sends a chef to a farmers market three times a week shouldn’t have the opportunity to stock their pantry with products that follow the same sourcing paradigm. That’s where we come in,” he continued.
Keepwell vinegar, like all vinegar, starts as wine. Isaiah notes this is one of the things that drew him and Sarah to vinegar: any sugar-intensive ingredient — think garlic, apples, sorghum, honey, grapes — can be made into “some kind of hooch.”
But as Isaiah points out, “no one’s going to drink a garlic wine.” So, they bring the wine to open-air vats that, with a lot of oxygen ferment the alcohol into vinegar. This process is slow and natural, which Isaiah says makes their product “a lot smoother and easier on you.”
The produce Isaiah and Sarah ferment is sourced directly from farms. Their flavors closely reflect the fields, offering Isaiah and Sarah an opportunity to support the growers they believe to be using great practices. Isaiah offers the heirloom tomato vinegar as an example:
“We’ll hear from growers at the peak of summer, and they’ll say, ‘Hey, we have millions of tomatoes.’ That’s when we can go in, buy pounds and keep that crop from rotting in the field, and hopefully amplify the farmer’s ability to grow what they want to grow the way they want to grow it.”
This is among the reasons Isaiah feels the partnership between Keepwell and Harvie is impactful, noting Harvie members embrace Keepwell’s unique, farmer-driven flavors.
Despite having wild, seasonal flavors like heirloom tomato on their roster, Isaiah does not refer to Keepwell Vinegar as “fancy;” he is clear these are for everyday use.
“A lot of what is considered fancy vinegar now is vinegar with some flavor sprayed on and then sweetened at the very end. It’s important to me not to present our product like that — we are strictly about taking the best of the ingredient and making vinegar,” he explained.
“We’re giving people a way to introduce interesting, fulfilling, and rewarding flavors into their food… and helping to make it more interesting to cook at home,” he said. “Our vinegar is very much for using substantially, not for drizzling on a strawberry or ice cream at the very end of a meal.”
A handful of Keepwell Vinegar products are available on Harvie — tawny rose, milk stout malt, golden apple, heirloom tomato, and a white miso, to name a few. Try them all!