Grasshopper
Retired Newbie
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2012
- Messages
- 40
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From my previous life as an engineer I know that a falling thin film of liquid is very efficient for mass transfer (i.e. moving a material to/from the liquid phase to the gas phase it is falling through). It is efficient because the transferring material (CO2 in our case) doesn't have far to go within the liquid to reach the surface and the turbulence of the film continually renews the surface with fresh CO2 containing wine. Thus I devised the following method of vacuum racking that should be more efficient than simple splash racking to move CO2 from the wine into the reduced pressure gas phase in the carboy. The method should work for gravity racking but probably not as well.
I took the racking cane which has a short leg at the top bent 90 degrees from the longer leg and inserted this into the stopper so that the transfer tube connects to the long leg and the short leg is in the carboy pointed at the side. Pulling a vacuum on the carboy causes the wine to impinge on the side of the carboy and fall down the side. See pics in the file below.
I have tried this a couple of times now and it seems to do a much better job of degassing compared with just having the wine fall straight to the bottom in a single stream. I wonder if anyone else has tried this and/or knows of a reason why it may not be as good of an idea as it seems.
I took the racking cane which has a short leg at the top bent 90 degrees from the longer leg and inserted this into the stopper so that the transfer tube connects to the long leg and the short leg is in the carboy pointed at the side. Pulling a vacuum on the carboy causes the wine to impinge on the side of the carboy and fall down the side. See pics in the file below.
I have tried this a couple of times now and it seems to do a much better job of degassing compared with just having the wine fall straight to the bottom in a single stream. I wonder if anyone else has tried this and/or knows of a reason why it may not be as good of an idea as it seems.
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