Monday, April 28, 2014

Wine Making Sanitizer And Its Importance

By Essie Osborn


Making of wine can be very interesting. This happens if one is involved with friends. Being involved in this procedure makes you unique as you doing something none of them is into. Identity is given to individuals who get themselves in this duty. When friends meet to drink, mostly they discuss the wine making processes. Like any other production, there are ingredients involved which include; yeast, malo-lactic and a variety of grapes. People keep forgetting the one most important procedure in this process. Wine making sanitizer. Information about it should be shared as it comes out to be a very vital step to wine making.

Sanitizing and cleaning can be the most boring part in this process. People fail to understand that it is the most important part of wine-making. Sanitizing is a bit of work but one should have in mind that it is an essential part that should be undertaken as far as quality is concerned.

In the process of sanitizing, chemicals are used and in our case we focus on home winemakers. The information given in this article describes the best chemicals to be used, disadvantages and advantages of them and being informative to individuals whose hobby lies in this field.

Generally, sanitizing is the treatment of equipment used, with a chemical in order to prevent or eliminate any growing spoilage organisms including yeasts, molds and bacteria. The equipment ought to be cleaned before sanitizing. This is because the process cannot be effective with visible residue.

The most effective cleaning methods of equipment are two. A cleaning solution could be used to scrub the fermentor with an advantage of less time consumption. However, one ends up with greasy elbows. Water and chemical Is another option whereby the fermentor should be soaked and given time to clean.

A combination of the two methods is the ideal bet as time used to wait the chemical clean is reduced and also the much scrubbing is no more. The equipment can be soaked for about 20 minutes as a cleaning solution is added. Thereafter, slight scrubbing is required to ensure all the residues are done away with.

With the current technological advances, there has been introduction of cleaning chemical known as percarbonates. It is a mixture of both sodium carbonate and hydrogen peroxide. It has some secret ingredients which makes it better than others. The chemicals stand a higher chance of removing dirt from equipments and is certain to work. Sanitation is made possible by inclusion of hydrogen peroxide. The percarbonates are environment friendly hence preferred over the others.

After the cleaning part is over, sanitizing comes. The sanitizers which include; campden tablets, sodium metabisulfite, and potassium metabisulfite are added to water. The solution made is then used to soak the equipment for around 5-30 minutes. Once done with the cleaning, it is recommendable to use potassium bisulfite for sanitizing the corks and bottles. This is because they are in long contact with wine and still potassium bisulfite is good for preservation purposes if used properly. It should be noted that in order to get positive results in this process, the equipments must be cleaned well first.




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