Of course, this wouldn't concentrate the cider flavour, which might be a drawback. Or, though it looks like work to me, you might just enjoy jacking.

I've got no actual experience with jacking, so I may be way off base here.

But it seems to me that if the vineagar melts faster than the water does, it's because it has a lower freezing point than water does. And it might be that if you allowed the ice to melt in your refrigerator, the difference in melting rate between the water and the vineagar would be enhanced, and the resulting vineagar melt would be stronger. The process would take rather longer, but with better results.

(See, a degree in physics can be put to good use!)

This is because the interface between solid and liquid is smoother and traps less liquid during freezing when the temperature gradient across the solidification interface is lower.

You could also look at the cider vinegar-water phase diagram and find an optimal temperature at which mostly-water ice would freeze out of mostly-acetic-acid vinegar. Then if you stirred the solution as it froze, you could judge by thermometer the optimum time to remove the slurry and filter out the ice.

But your freezer probably doesn't have room for an electric mixer.

But you probably don't have room for the nano-machine generators in your refrigerator, either.

Yeesh. Let the poor woman jack some vinegar, hey guys?

Owner of a large refrigerator,
Bob

I didn't seriously expect you to explore the vinegar-water phase diagram, install a mixer in your freezer, connect a thermocouple and wait for an alarm at a set point, etc.. I might more seriously recommend that you look into using a water-faucet aspirator to pull a vacuum on a pressure cooker you were using for vacuum-enhaced distillation.

Flowing water enters a channel in the body of the aspirator. This channel decreases in diameter at a point along its length. As the water passes into the narrowed section of the channel its linear velocity increases and its pressure decreases. The narrow part of the channel, where the pressure is low, is provided with an intersecting channel which opens to the outside of the aspirator device's body. In operation, this channel is connected by a pipe or hose to the vessel in which one wishes to reduce the pressure.

Air from that vessel flows along the pipe or hose into the aspirator, where the pressure is lower than in the vessel. They can't really pull a hard vacuum, and there's a tendency for water to be drawn back up the connecting channel as pressure at the throat of the aspirator channel varies.

Water faucet aspirators are often found in chemistry labs. A typical application would be to connect the aspirator to the side-arm of a side-arm Erlenmeyer flask and insert a filter funnel through a stopper into the flask's mouth. The pressure differential between the atmosphere and the inside of the flask increases the flow of liquid through the small holes in the filter funnel.

I found a lab equipment vendor listing of such a device for $111, but I'm sure they could be made or bought for less. The device's performance is interesting, though, "The water aspirator will evacuate 10a0liters of air to less than 60a0mma0Hg in less than 6a0minutes at 15a0psi water pressure. " That's over a two gallon volume reduced to about a thirteenth of an atmosphere.

I found an ASU page which showed a home experiment in vacuum, seemed to assume a cheap plastic aspirator, so if you have any science lab supply stores in town, you might be able to get something for a few dollars. Mortuary supply stores also carry aspirators, though I expect they'd be overpriced.

If you're interested in rolling your own, you might find instructions for constructing a simple aspirator in a book on constructing simple science experiments. UNESCO used to have some good books like this, but I would guess that there are a couple someplace at the Strand Bookstore.

Oh, if you do this, use a "vacuum breaker" to keep the contents of the vacuum vessel from being sucked back up into the water supply pipes.

A simple mechanism for pulling moderate vacuums using an electric pump can also be constructed. This is useful if you want to avoid using a lot of water to pull a vacuum, but you still need to buy or build the Venturi aspirator device.

I think the "suction" side of the pump is probably too large to work well pumping air instead of water, though.

Anyway, if we can't have vacuum distillation in every kitchen, it's just not worth the trouble of living here in the future. It would be like not being able to degauss fresh corn, and instead having to eat it off the cob like animals.

Oh, and I wanted to say that I hope you are at least as proud to have Teresa as your daughter as I have been to have her as my friend through those years. She is truly an exceptional person, even if she sometimes does things the hard way.