Brewed an american pale today, and after pitching my starter I smelled the flask because I just enjoy the smell of yeast. Today I caught a whiff of lacto sourness and so I went ahead and tasted what was left and it has a hint of lemon sourness to it. Since it is after I pitched I have no recourse at this point and will be riding this one out. The starter was boiled on the rangetop in the flask, so I am assuming that would have killed off anything in the flask. My star san is fresh, but has been used to sanitize a wine theif I used on a sour I have going. My question is will star san kill lacto? Lacto obviously has a high tolerance to low pH environments, could I have infectdd my batch of star san and perpetuated that infection through my starter and now into my wort?
This is the reason I toss the dolla and make a new batch each time. I also keep two buckets that I swap out each time I brew. One for clean and one for funky. Admittedly- I'm more of a funk brewer these days than clean but I've yet to have a cross contamination.
I also suspect what little lacto may have been present will be out sourced by the yeast and will be held back by the ibus of the beer.
Oh yeah, that lacto. In that case, you're totally screwed. Nothing kills that lacto. Dump your pale ale. Throw away anything that touched that lacto. Move to a new house to escape that lacto. Never use that lacto again!
You boiled your flask. Assuming a 10 minute flask boil, lacto won't survive that. Not even HF lacto. In the unlikely event the lacto survived the flask boil or you contaminated it with a thermometer after cooling, the greater than 25IBU in the pale ale will kill the lacto or prevent growth. A starsan pH of 2.5 is low enough to kill more than 99% of the microbe population, especially if the microbes are sitting in a bucket of starsan for longer than a few minutes. I'd bet a large percentage of home brews with good sanitation are infected, but not to an extent that matters. I routinely use my funky beer buckets for clean beers and they haven't been infected in a meaningful way. I kinda want one of them to get mega infected someday just to prove to myself it can happen. Starters can smell and taste sour sometimes. This isn't a good indicator of a lacto infection. Some yeasts smell sour or tart straight out of the pack. Which yeast did you use for the pale ale?
