A couple of questions after my first a/b -

1. When doing your acid cooks does it matter if the pH goes below 4? I thought it better to err on the side of lower than 4 rather than potentially a little higher. I'm using pH paper so the difference between 4 and 5 isn't always totally clear. I went a little bit extra and probably ended up with a ph closer to 1 or 2. Is this a problem?

2. If you get the pH of your water to be 4 then you add this to your bark and start heating, the pH is going to drop as it heats up. In the DMT handbook the ph of the water is 4 before heating so this would have resulted in a lower pH once it was added and heated.

You may ask why I'm not using an electric pH meter - I've used electric ph meters before but they always end up going totally erratic after a while and have to be replaced. From what I gather this is standard as the probes need to be replaced quite often.

1. The only real upshot of having a lower pH is needing to use more base to raise the pH again. With standard methods there's usually an excess of base used so it isn't too much of an issue.

2. This isn't phrased as a question.