Bucket as secondary fermenter for kriek.

I just got 13 pounds of tart cherries to add to a one year old lambic for a kriek. Is it ok to use a bucket as the secondary fermenter? I am worried I might end up making cherry vinegar. I put the cherries in the freezer so getting them into a carboy might be a real pain. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I asked similar question about using a bucket for the entire fermentation process. What I took away from the responses is that although buckets are certainly more oxygen permeable than glass carboys, it likely will not cause an issue to ferment your sour beer for a long time in a bucket.

I'm going to perform a long experiment in which I make two identical extract kits (Dawson's Kriek from NB) and allow one to ferment in a glass secondary and the other to ferment in a bucket the entire time.

If the seal on the lid is good, there should not be any problem. If there is a leak through the seal, you will eventually get a lot of oxygen in the headspace (entropy will make sure this happens). Having a lot of O2 in the headspace will result in stale beer and possible vinegar if you also get acetobacteria.

Also hopefully the cherries will give the yeast/bacteria enough sugar to cover the head space with co2.

If you leave it shut for the length of aging it will probably be ok. If you keep opening it to look at it or take gravity samples you will probably have vinegar.

acuenca said:

Also hopefully the cherries will give the yeast/bacteria enough sugar to cover the head space with co2.

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The cherry puree I added to my kriek yesterday certainly created plenty of co2. I wouldn't be too concerned.

Thanks for the quick responses. Will 3 months on the cherries be long enough?

Doing same thing guys, Pellicle has pretty much dropped after about 5 months and am ready to add cherries.

I have two questions

Where and what kind of cherries are you guys using. I'm in the NE and can't seem to find any fresh sour cherries....

Just dump them right in? Or rack on top?

I will be using whole montmorency cherries. From what I have read you should transfer the lambic onto the cherries and to try and minimize the splashing. I will probably add the cherries to the bucket, purge the bucket with CO2, transfer lambic onto the cherries, and then purge the bucket again. It's probably over kill but I would hate to end up with vinegar after aging a beer for a year.

I'm using a cherry puree Northern Brewer sells. I added the puree to a carboy and racked my kriek on top. For the second batch, I'm going to try adding the puree directly to the primary bucket.