Tweet
Hi all,
I apologize for how greenhorn of a question this is, but I'm trying to figure out how much racking we need to do.
So we are a very tiny operation soon to get into a small winery setup. Right now our wine takes about 4.5 weeks start to finish. Previously we've been doing everything the home-brew way, in carboys and such. We're jumping to scaling up and we're getting a line of small unitanks -- my question is, with the unitanks, since I have the two butterfly valves on the bottom (one at the very bottom, one above it with a rack tube that can be positioned down), do I need to rack the wine or can I just dump the yeast out? I'm guessing this won't get all of it out, which is why I'm asking if this is okay. We'll also be force carbonating in our tanks before we package, so I wasn't sure if any yeast present (if we never racked and just dumped periodically during the fermentation process) would cause an issue (being possible nucleation points to let the co2 breakout of solution)?
I'm thinking we'll either rack every time, or dumped yeast the entire way but at least rack to a clean tank before we carbonate with a stone/pump set up? Maybe not though, because if we only had to ever dump yeast, and never rack, I'd be a very happy camper knowing it was perfectly acceptable and wouldn't hurt our wine any
Again, thanks in advance for your patience here, as this is a no brainer question but, we've had trouble finding anyone around to ask first hand, and this forum has always been an incredible place for information.
I apologize for how greenhorn of a question this is, but I'm trying to figure out how much racking we need to do.
So we are a very tiny operation soon to get into a small winery setup. Right now our wine takes about 4.5 weeks start to finish. Previously we've been doing everything the home-brew way, in carboys and such. We're jumping to scaling up and we're getting a line of small unitanks -- my question is, with the unitanks, since I have the two butterfly valves on the bottom (one at the very bottom, one above it with a rack tube that can be positioned down), do I need to rack the wine or can I just dump the yeast out? I'm guessing this won't get all of it out, which is why I'm asking if this is okay. We'll also be force carbonating in our tanks before we package, so I wasn't sure if any yeast present (if we never racked and just dumped periodically during the fermentation process) would cause an issue (being possible nucleation points to let the co2 breakout of solution)?
I'm thinking we'll either rack every time, or dumped yeast the entire way but at least rack to a clean tank before we carbonate with a stone/pump set up? Maybe not though, because if we only had to ever dump yeast, and never rack, I'd be a very happy camper knowing it was perfectly acceptable and wouldn't hurt our wine any
Again, thanks in advance for your patience here, as this is a no brainer question but, we've had trouble finding anyone around to ask first hand, and this forum has always been an incredible place for information.