Brewing with lacto advice

[DaftCaskBC]

Recently I have been brewing sours using 1 oz of 88% lactic acid to drop the ph of a 5 gallon batch to about 4.

I live in a one bedroom apartment with my wife so doing a sour mash is out. She wouldn't put up with the stink.

What advice do any of you have to bump the fermentation temperature up to the 90F threshold with my primary? Space heater in a closet? I live in Vancouver so we rarely hit those ambient temps...

 

[SpeedYellow]

Look into kettle souring. Run off the wort into boil kettle, cool to 90-95F, pitch a lacto strain, wait a couple days to sour. Then boil or pasteurize or just pitch your sacc.

 

[crocks86]

I recently used probiotics for a kettle sour that worked out pretty well. I kept the kettle in a small bathroom with the heat at about 25C (I'm in NL so we definitely do not get ambient temps suitable for lacto fermentaiton), pitched the lacto starter at about 35 after raising it to near boiling for a few minutes after the sparge and just let it go. It dropped to about 25 degrees after 24 hours but the pH went from around 5.8 down to 3.3 in that time frame. Ended up not having time to boil so it stayed for about 48 hours and ended up at 3.1 which was a hell of a lot lower than I expected.

Starter was just three probiotic pills in 500ml wort. I think the pills were like 20 billion cells each, and had 8 strains of lacto including plantarum and rhamnosus which I've heard are the preferable ones to have from probiotic sources

 

[feinbera]

I can get a plastic bucket fermentor to hold 105° using a temp controller and ferm wrap – but I have to wrap a layer of that reflective bubblewrap insulation on top of the ferm wrap, then cover the whole kit and kaboodle, sides and top, with a heavy winter blanket.