Your preference for acidifying the mash; acidulated malt or lactic acid?

Currently I'm using sauermalz to acidify my mash, but wondering if lactic acid 88% might have any advantages since I always keep some on hand. For example, will the mash pH stabilize faster with lactic acid?

Since both contain lactic acid, perhaps there's really no difference?

I would think lactic acid would be more convenient and cheaper than sauermalz. However, I always use phosphoric acid instead for both mash and sparge water.

Both Phosphoric and Lactic are considered "tasteless" in the amounts that we'd use them for adjusting mash PH, although phosphoric is considered the most neutral tasting.

I used lactic 88% exclusively just because it's easy to keep it on hand and it has a really long shelf life. I believe that the rate of PH change is basically the same as with saurmalz as you're waiting for the acid and the malt buffers to duke it out for a while.


Adam

Hard to use acid malt to lower the pH of your sparge water.

danielbt said:

Hard to use acid malt to lower the pH of your sparge water.

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Indeed. Since I use lactic acid 88% for the sparge water, that got me thinking "gee, why don't I just use this for the strike water too, instead of the acid malt?"

Presumably, a great many of us have asked ourselves this same question, so I'm wondering how you answered it.