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First kettle souring - just a few questions

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  • First kettle souring - just a few questions

    Greetings everyone,
    we are going to do our first kettle soured beer on tuesday. It'll be berliner weisse soured with Wildbrew Sour Pitch lactobacillus. I read lot of brewing tips and techniques in last days, but i still have a few questions on my mind.

    - purging wort with CO2 - I plan running the wort (after a quick boil) through our heat exchanger and cool it to 35 °C. The question is, how to make the CO2 purge afterwards? I can hook up a carb stone at the end of heat exchanger and let CO2 flow through the carb stone direct into wort (with speed let's say 0,5 l/min). Or it is sufficient to make a CO2 "blanket" on top of the cooled wort in the kettle, put a lid on and insulate all openings with duct tape?

    - lowering pH of wort before pitching lactobacillus - the idea now is to lower pH of wort from cca 5,4 to 4,5 with lactic acid addition (80% concentration). I know there is no universal rule to specify how much lactic acid to use, so a want to do it approximately and see the result. I figured out by reading discussions, that right amout of lactic acid can be cca 0,3 ml added to 1 l of wort. In our kettle will be cca 700 l of wort and that means addition of 210 ml lactic acid. Can it be at least approximately right?

    - maintaining right temperature during the souring process (cca 35 °C) - our kettle has a gas burner heating with automatic temperature control and a stirrer at the bottom. My idea now is to let the gas burner automatically heat the wort when the temperature drops below 35 °C. But I think gentle stirring is in this case neccesary because at the bottom of kettle can sediment heavy particles and this sedimentet layer can get burned when not stirred. Question is, if very gently stirring can do any harm to the souring process?

    Many many thanks for any suggestions!

  • #2
    That all looks right to me. You shouldn't need to bother with a stone though, all you'll want to do is push some CO2 into the kettle from the man-way at the end. Blanketing the top of the kettle for the overnight sour is all you need to worry about.

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    • #3
      What is the reasoning for adding lactic acid before inoculating? Are you concerned about contamination? Seems like pH reduction is the job of the lacto. I've always inoculated at 5.2 with a blanket of CO2 and typically terminate at 3.3 without any issues.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by torque2 View Post
        What is the reasoning for adding lactic acid before inoculating? Are you concerned about contamination? Seems like pH reduction is the job of the lacto. I've always inoculated at 5.2 with a blanket of CO2 and typically terminate at 3.3 without any issues.

        I always add lactic acid to reduce pH to a more lacto bacteria friendly range of 4.6pH. It's just an extra precaution to reduce the risk of something else taking a foothold before the lacto takes off and drops the pH.

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