I'm into my first Berliner and it's happily fermenting in primary. I boiled a full sour mash for 10 minutes and transferred to my bucket after the wort cooled. It still looks like it has that white haze on the top of wort when I pitched my Kolsch yeast. I'm assuming that's normal. I'm thinking that the ale pale isn't going to be infected and my keg won't be infected because I boiled the wort before it went into the fermenter. I want to double check before I infect a bunch of my gear. Am I overlooking anything here? I'd think I'll need to scrub everything a little harder next time around to remove the lactic tang, but that's about it.
I'm not going to answer...because I get a bit OCD when it comes to things like this. In other words, I tend to throw rational thought out the window...and aint nobody got time for that.
I don't think that there are many organisms of any size on this planet that can survive being boiled for ten minutes, much less any single-celled ones.
Pretty much nothing is going to survive 10 minutes of boiling, particularly considering that 10 minutes of boiling usually includes like 15 minutes or more time over the ~170 degree "safe zone" as it heats to boiling and cools down. Besides, even if there was an issue, the only expensive thing in that group is the keg, and you could boil 5 gallons of water and put it in the keg if you had to.
There are some spore-forming bacteria that can survive boiling. However, they generally don't show up in beer. I believe that while they could slip through the heat filter, competition with yeast, including competition for sugar and inhibition by fermentation products (acidity, alcohol) will keep the odd spore-former in check. Food microbiologists will warn that you should use a pressure canner, not a water bath canner, if you are canning starter wort for later use. The higher temps achieved by the pressure canner will wipe out the spore formers. Since at least one of them is known to create the botulinum toxin, it seems like a good idea. But probably, you are more likely to die from a glass carboy injury.
You're right. Forgot about the spores. However, since one of the signs of a botulism infection in cans is bulging, what if botulism got in your bottles to give you bottle bombs, and you had a case next to a carboy, and when the one bottle explode it started a chain reaction that knocked over your carboy while you were pulling a gravity reading, and your hydrometer broke? Then you'd need a back up hydrometer like everybody says they have.
