grape pack bag

[davewaz]

Do any of you have any ideas on how to sink the stupid floating grape pack bag? Would putting marbles in it sink it?

 

[Tom]

No need to sink the bag.
Instead "punch" it down 2X a day

 

[Flem]

+1 to what Tom said. It isn't necessary to keep it submerged, just punch it down occasionally. P.S. - you would need a lot of marbles to hold it down.

 

[davewaz]

K will do, thanks for the advice.

 

[DrJayman]

punching is good as mentioned to get "goodness" out of the bag on a regular basis. There are days I can't or may not be able to get in to do this so I obtained a glass ball (about the size of a baseball) I sterilize and weight the bag down with to keep it under the surface between punch-downs and stirring. This way there is almost no chance of the bag contracting any source of infection. Works like a charm.

 

[Dugger]

I had a discussion with Spagnols about this a couple of weeks ago. Gayle, who replaced Lisa, advised me that their research showed that squeezing the grapepack in addition to punching it down over a period of about 8 days provided the optimum extraction for their packs. This is not something I would normally do, but I intend to next time I do one of these kits, even though it means sanitzing hands/gloves to do it.
You might want to consider this in deciding whether to weight the pack down or not, since weighting them would make squeezing quite difficult.

 

[mmadmikes1]

Guess washing hands is not normal for eastern CanadiansLOLOLOLOl

 

[Dugger]

My wife keeps noticing my hands have a red tinge to them when I come out of my wine room and suggests I should wash them and I keep telling her " but honey, I just did and I used my special grapeskin scrubber to get my nails clean too"!!

 

[Lurker]

My wife keeps noticing my hands have a red tinge to them when I come out of my wine room and suggests I should wash them and I keep telling her " but honey, I just did and I used my special grapeskin scrubber to get my nails clean too"!!

My kind of guy.

 

[robie]

Shoot, weighting it down doesn't work very well anyway, as there is so much CO2, it comes to the surface anyway, for the first week. I guess a baseball-sized glass ball would do the trick, though.

I take advantage of this fact, when I want to ferment to dry in the primary bucket and I want to leave the grape pack in the wine a little longer.

You don't want the grape pack to float unless you are able to punch it down a couple of times a day. A floating grape pack can start molding. However, once I snap the lid down and add an air lock, I don't want to be opening the fermentor regularly to punch the pack down.

So, I put several pounds of marbles in the bag, which still lets it float for about a week. By the time I get ready to snap the lid down and add an air lock, the CO2 has diminished enough that the grape pack bag will finally sink and stay down.

The amount of weight needed is a trial and error scenario, so sometimes I have to tie on another bag of marbles to the grape bag just before I seal the fermentor. You surely don't want to open the fermentor after a week and find the grape pack floating and smelling musty.