Airlocks on barrels

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Rocky

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I was wondering what all you barrel owners/users do about the bung on your barrel. A few months back, I was in my family room and heard a bung hit the sheet metal duct of my HVAC system in the cellar. I immediately took that wine out of the barrel and put it back into a carboy. Today, I had just moved 12 gallons of Cabernet Sauvignon into the barrels and I was bottling another 6 gallons of that wine when the bung popped off. I got my boring tool and bored out both bungs from the barrels and installed airlocks.

Has anyone had this experience? I have seen barrels in commercial wineries with airlocks but we never used airlocks at home years ago when we made wine in 55 gallon barrels.

Thanks.
 
Alot of the commercial wineries I've seen use a bung with a flap on top to release pressure should it build up. You're lucky you were home when this went off!
 
you can just buy a bung with a hole in it and fit a normal airlock or buy a fermrite vented bung.

any wineshop should have one or the other .

if your wine was dry when it went in the barrels its possible a wild mlf started and thats what produced the co2 and pressure
and your old 55 gallon barrels never went through mlf , so no pressure was created.

you should inoculate conduct full mlf , either before you barrel and only barrel stable wine or conduct mlf in the barrel under airlock .

if you did mlf , its possible it wasn't fully completed and came alive again when your free so2 levels dropped low enough.

once the wine is stable and sulfited a solid bung can go in.
 
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They make a dry airlock (silicone) for the 23L barrels. I have one but never used it. I just use the solid silicone. Never had one pop yet!
 
I haven't had any pop from my two 23 liter barrels. I have solid silicon, silicon with the hole for the air lock and silicone with the flap. I use the latter when I fermented in the barrel in the past and it worked great..
 
I use silicone bungs with air locks on all barrels until I'm 100% sure mlf is completed. If a solid bung does pop I aways replace it with an air locked one.
 
Yes, there were the silicone bungs that Vadai sells with the barrels. Odd thing is that they are two different shapes; one is mushroom shaped and the other is shaped/tapered like any stopper. I measured the bung hole and my guess is that an #8.5 stopper would fit. Anyone know for sure?
 
hard to say , I have 3 vadias and they all use differnt sized airlocks.
 

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