Pro tip: Never trust a $15 pH meter off Amazon for fermenting

I bought a cheap digital pH meter for like $15 because I wanted to get serious about my hot sauce ferments. It read 4.2 on a batch of peppers that ended up molding after two weeks. Turns out it was off by almost a whole point and I was way too alkaline. I spent another $45 on a decent brand from a brewing supply site and now I sanity check it against test strips every month. Has anyone else gotten burned by bad gear like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

webb.hannah2d ago

Wait, tbh doesn't pH and alkalinity mean different things?

matthewking1d ago

I actually just read an article about this the other day. pH measures how acidic or basic something is on a scale, while alkalinity is more like the water's ability to resist changes in pH. So you can have a low pH but high alkalinity if there's a lot of buffering agents in there, like baking soda in a pool for example. @webb.hannah, it's a common mix up because people hear 'alkaline' and think pH, but they're measuring different things entirely.

corap611d ago

It's one of those things (like "flammable" vs "inflammable") where common sense gets in the way of the actual definition.