alpha-bromo propionic acid

[halfapint]

In the thread following Rhodium's

Post 212002

(Rhodium: "Easy nitroethane in quantitative yield", Methods Discourse), with its quantitative nitroethane synthesis, was a flurry of citations about producing the initial alpha-bromopropionic acid. It's easy as sin, look at all the people that know how to do it. Citation wars just don't tend to produce plain English discussions, which are more beneficial to beez who don't live in libraries.

Say I got lactic acid, can I just boil it in HBr(aq.) to get the title compound? Had I won the lactic acid from its calcium salt with dilute sulfuric acid, would it then serve to add potassium bromide to the filtrate, to generate the HBr in situ, before that reflux?
turning science fact into <<science fiction>>