Pasteurizing Beer?

The thread about boiling beer to make it NA reminded my of a problem I'm having with my raspberry lambic. I've been adding lambic dregs from commercial lambics and one of them( I think the Oude Kriek lambic -this stuff is like vinegar BTW) had acetobactor in it and now the beer has some vinegary sourness to it. Its not as bad as the Oude Kriek, and not out of style yet, but its too sour for what I want. The natural fix is to blend it, which I plan on doing. My plan is to blend it with a very low gravity finished beer so that the acetobacter won't have much new to eat. Once the beers are blended the only food they will eventually get is priming sugar. So the sourness shouldn't increase too much.
This seems solid to me, but I've got a lot of time and money(serveral pounds of raspberries) invested so I'd like to make sure. The other option I'm afraid of, is to pasteurize the beer to kill the acetobacter. Any opinions on which way to go, or your experience pasteurizing a beer would be appreciated.

There is no practical way for a homebrewer to pasteurize beer. Your best bet is to use campden tablets to kill anything in the original beer. Then blend, prime and add yeast before bottling.

By the way, acetobacter can be a real pain to get rid of in your brewery. It eats alcohol, not sugar.

david_42 said:

There is no practical way for a homebrewer to pasteurize beer. Your best bet is to use campden tablets to kill anything in the original beer. Then blend, prime and add yeast before bottling.

By the way, acetobacter can be a real pain to get rid of in your brewery. It eats alcohol, not sugar.

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Well its been like this for months and hasn't spread, so at least that's good. Why isn't pasteurizing possible? Maybe I'm using the wrong terminology, I was imagining just heating the beer in a pot to 170F or whatever to kill everything. I can't imagine this won't negatively affect the beer though. I thought about K-Met( or campden, we just use powdered potassium metabisulfate at work) but I've read mixed reviews about it killing EVERYTHING, and if there's any left its just going to regrow and re-sour,etc. It does seem like the best bet though, thanks for the advise. If the K-Met doesn't kill everything what do you think the bottled/blended beer might end up like?

Pasteurising beer is a sure way to ruin it - my local brewery sells draught beers which are excellent, and identical beer that is bottled and pasteurised, which tastes much worse and dosen't improve with age

landhoney said:

Well its been like this for months and hasn't spread, so at least that's good. Why isn't pasteurizing possible? Maybe I'm using the wrong terminology, I was imagining just heating the beer in a pot to 170F or whatever to kill everything. I can't imagine this won't negatively affect the beer though. I thought about K-Met( or campden, we just use powdered potassium metabisulfate at work) but I've read mixed reviews about it killing EVERYTHING, and if there's any left its just going to regrow and re-sour,etc. It does seem like the best bet though, thanks for the advise. If the K-Met doesn't kill everything what do you think the bottled/blended beer might end up like?

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I believe that beer is flash pasteurized...it is pumped through very small tubes at a high temp (and probably high pressure too) and cooled very quickly. I know from draft/versus bottle tasting that even this has a negative effect on the taste of the beer (commercial) I would guess that the slow climb to 170 and slow drop back down would do even worse things to the beer.

You could try it with a couple quarts and see what happens.

I am not sure of the size of acetobacter, but filtering may be a possibility and then redose with a measured amount of a stable yeast for bottling, I believe this is how many sour beers are made.

hi i have pasteurized some beer by letting the bottles around 10-30 minutes at 73 Celtsius degrees (in the BK) i drain the hot water ant run water at room temp by using a plastic hose (to the BK bottom) i let the water for 10 minutes, drain the water and run cold water around 10 celsius degrees and let it for another 10-20 minutes. I have made several test and works obviusly the beer has to be consumed maybe between 3 months.

It's easy and works perfectly.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f32/easy-stove-top-pasteurizing-pics-193295/