Sour Flower Vinegar: Living A Fruitful Life on the Big Island
If yIf you need a momentary escape, click over to the instagram page for Sour Flower Vinegar for sun-kissed videos of super fit Alex and Shannon Wiener harvesting fresh bananas, guavas, loquats and mangoes amongst large-leafed tropical palms. After a few of their videos went viral, their small, 5-gallon barrel vinegar operation went from a local community-focused famers market stand to having 30,000 followers overnight.
TTheir move to Hawaii wasn’t about vinegar at first. They had lived in Oahu for five years after Alex stint in San Francisco as an engineer introduced them to the concept of sourdough pizza — specifically, Anthony Mangieri’s naturally-fermented Neapolitan pizza at Una Pizza Napoletana. [Mangieri’s since relocated his business to New York City.] The two were both entirely captivated by the “Purity and care in the product; simple yet elegant ingredients,” reflects Alex. A job landed the two in Denver for a year, where Shannon worked at the hearth baked Denver Bread Company for a year, committed to learning more about yeast and microbes, further his curiosity for the craft.
A move to Oahu in 2013 launched the beginnings of Fire Dance Pizza, selling wood-fired sourdough pies at the Kailua Farmers’ Market for five years. As they were all set to open a restaurant, the pandemic had other plans. “My husband makes pizza dough every single day, even since the business shut down,” Alex says. With the need to continue creating, and surrounded by incredible fruit, Alex and Shannon sought a new project, with a bigger scope: to buy a farm and start some sort of brewery — all based around the Big Island and a compost plan. “[On one tangerine tree,] [on the island] there can be 1000 tangerines! [No one can] keep up with harvest or eating that much … In an ideal world, we’d throw some into a fermentation vat," ideated Alex.
The uniqueness of Sour Flower’s vinegars is its sustainable nature. “Soursop vinegar tastes identical to soursop fruit, like Skittles,” Alex quips, “but once it ripens, the fruit goes pretty quickly.” Alex and Shannon had a tree on their property which they can’t keep up with — even vendors at the farmers market give them boxes of unsold fruit to create anew. “We’ve never bought fruit for this business. We never know what we’re going to have next.”
Cloves, cacao, lilikoi (passionfruit), papaya, pomelo, jackfruit and jaboticaba tree grapes — a white-pulped dark purple fruit that grows on the exterior trunk of a tree and tastes like cinnamon-y concords — are of abundance, and are all sourced on their property, neighbors, friends and foraged in the wild. Upon hiking in the Kipuka forests, pristine old growths amongst lava flows, Alex and Shannon noticed “glistening red jewels hanging from trees.” What they came across was ‘akala berries, which are similar to raspberries, aka the elusive biggest berry on earth. They picked some for later use, likely vinegar. Abiding by this whimsical nature of Sour Flower’s guiding philosophy is simply this: nature tells them what to do.