How exactly does brief pasteurization cause damage?
Evaporates alcohol, changes flavour profiles, can set pectins, etc. If cooking alcoholic beverages worked we'd all be doing it.
The only heating generally used is beer worts and theres no alcohol or fermented flavours at that stage is there. The heating is for mashing/conversion of starches etc.
Its a bit like people wanting to heat honey musts. You can do that, it may even help sort raw honey proteins so its less like to foam like hell, etc. Yet people forget, most of the recipes that suggest that part in a process of making, was because people thought honey needed pasteurising. Archaic recipes......the heating was likely more to sanitise the water.
Pasteurisation comes from a time before anti-biotics and mass testing of cattle for bovine TB etc. It was adopted wholesale by food industry to help with extending shelf life and so they didn't get sued. It can help but isn't necessary.
With booze, correctly made, its the alcohol that is the preservative. With beers you need a higher level of sanitation generally as there's less preservative qualities what with lower alcohol etc.
If this is chucking corks about its been made poorly and has been rushed to the bottle.
Putting back into a carboy redresses that. Rather than adding a potentially damaging stage to it.
Hell you could probably bubble ozone through it too, as commonly done in food processing, but I'd suspect that'd b3 a bad idea too.....
