How to keep your equipment clean when kettle souring?

[EcuPirate07]

I've been brewing for years, but I wanna try my hand at a sour. So I'm planning on doing a gose this weekend. I just had some questions pop up and haven't been really able to pin down what I'm looking for.

So let me pick your brains. I'm gonna kettle sour with goodbelly, but I have a couple questions. How did you keep the temp constant with a temp controller? I was thinking about literally souring in my metal 5 gallon pot with a heating wrap, then all I would have to do is bring it back to the stove and bring it up to about 170 to pasteurize. But I didn't wanna keep my temp prob in the pot due to infection (and I wouldn't be able to boil with the prob because of how I ran it through the Fermentation chamber), I was thinking about maybe some kind of plastic wrap to keep it clean. Or I could just dump the wort in a bucket and tape the prob to the outside of the bucket and do it that way. Also when checking your ph level how did you keep your prob from infection? (i.e. Checking wort to make sure it had hit the right ph) I have the Milwaukee MW102 PH and Temperature Meter I don't know what chemicals such as bleach may degrade the prob. Thanks for the help! I'm sure I'm way overthinking all this but I just want to have a solid game plan.

 

[b-boy]

Your pH probe shouldn't be an issue. Even if it gets infected, you're using it on a small sample of wort. You're not dunking it into the pot.

As far as the temp probe, I'd probably go with taping it to the outside of the pot. I don't think I'd want it in the pot. However, I think Starsan would probably be able to kill whatever is growing on it.

 

[Sourz4life]

Normal sanitation practices really. Its not as bad as its made out to be if you are thorough with cleaning. Just make sure everything gets about 10 minutes of contact time with star san and your fine. My temp probe is always in the middle of the pot as you won't get accurate readings. The metal will heat up before the liquid if you have a heat wrap on it which will turn it off before the liquid reaches your set temp.

 

[EcuPirate07]

Thanks for the info, pretty much as expected!