Replacing brine

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Replacing brine

Postby jcole1989 on Thu Jul 02, 2020 7:52 am

I made my first batch of fermented dill pickles last week and have been enjoying them immensely.

Last night I needed to move the remaining pickles from the gallon jar quart size jars to free up the gallon jar for a new batch (have a lot of fresh cucumbers coming in from the garden).

Here's the twist: in my haste to get to the new pickle batch I accidentally discarded almost all of the brine before realizing I'd forgotten to pour it into the new containers. I had a little bit of brine left and used that, but then had to supplement with new brine.

Is replacing most of the brine like this safe? How does it affect the acidity content -- obviously the pickles are sour now, but will the ph rise as the solution equalizes? Should I wait for more fermentation to occur?
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Re: Replacing brine

Postby Christopher Weeks on Thu Jul 02, 2020 8:45 am

If you like them the way they are, and have room in the fridge, that would be the safest course. If you're leaving them at room temp, you could add some vinegar to keep the pH low. It would change the flavor some, but as long as you didn't make it too low, I'd expect fermentation to continue. And it might be fine just topping off with regular brine and leaving it be. I've done stuff like that myself and it was fine, but I'm less interested in suggesting that course to others.
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Re: Replacing brine

Postby jcole1989 on Tue Jul 07, 2020 10:11 am

Thanks for the feedback.

I did some more reading on this, and hopefully this helps for anyone else with this question. A few things:

1. Ph is measured on a logarithmic scale, so you need to dilute an acid by 10x to change the Ph by 1. So I had a good bit of buffer with the acid in the cucumbers themselves and in having reserved some of the pickling juice but not all.
2. I found this interesting calculator on that front (shows acetic acid or vinegar, not lactic acid, which has a different ph, but still interesting in giving you an idea of how the log scale affects things).
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