Thoughts on Water Bath Wort Canning

manoaction · 01-20-2012, 07:53 PM

I don’t use starters as much as I should, and I’d like to drop that bad habit. To make it easier, I’d like to start canning wort, but I don’t have a pressure cooker.

I was curious if people had ever added citric acid to their wort to pull it down below ph4.6, then diluted it with water to bring it back up to ph5.5 when they were ready to make their starter.

My math works thusly…

A properly tuned mash should exit the tun around ph 5.5. My water has an alkalinity of 36 ppm CaCO3. If I add 1.16 grams of Citric Acid to 3 gallons, that will knock it down to 4.5. I then water bath can.

Later when it is time to begin my starter I mix equal parts of wort and some fresh water with baking soda to bring it back up to 5.5 and then pitch.

The downside of this being that buffer calculation would be pretty tricky seeing that I’m not a chemist. Trial, error, and ph strips should be able to help you perfect the ratio based on your tap water’s ph and alkalinity.

I suppose it might also be pain to mash high gravity wort just for starters, but you could make a session out of the second runnings or boil the crap out of it.

What are your thoughts?

**MalFet** · 01-20-2012, 11:51 PM

Hmm...I don't mean to be negative, but I'm not sure I get it. This seems like an awful lot of work to avoid either buying a pressure cooker or using DME. What's the upshot?

manoaction · 01-23-2012, 04:39 PM

The upshot would be the speed of canned wort versus the boiling, mixing and cooling of DME. Price difference too.

The pressure cooker costs 50 bucks, but I already have plenty of citric acid and soda. It seemed free and easy once you figured out the math.

jmf143 · 01-23-2012, 05:28 PM

I take the excess of my final runnings and freeze it in a ziploc bag until I need to make a starter. Cheap and easy.