Sanitizing oak from a Wick Weed soured bourbon barrel

[Brudolph]

Thanks for all the good thoughts. The sticks of wood have been jostled around exposing all side to both good and bad bugs.

My brewing partner and I have planned to pitch the wood chunks into boiling water a minute or two to kill surface funk and hopefully save the internal critter of the wood.

I have been trying to find a home page or at least a schedule for the Sour Hour. Any help would be much appreciated.

[BDawg]

My guess is that you are going to kill all the bugs if you boil them.

Maybe you could split them into 2 sections -
boil 1/2 like you said, then pitch the other 1/2 into a small sample like Tom said and see if they taste good or something nasty grows.

HTH-

[brewinhard]

What about steaming 1/2 for a few minutes instead of boiling?

[spiderwrangler]

Any kind of heating is going to end up killing any of the bugs that get hot. Hopefully the good bugs have some penetration into the wood, then you could just do a 5 min soak in Starsan and potentially kill any of the surface bugs while leaving your souring friends within intact.