Are crystals a problem with SP?

[crabjoe]

I'm still reading about making wine and I found that crystals can form when you chill wine...

Now I'm wondering if SP will form crystals if refrigerated... Because if it does, I'm going to have to figure out a way to form them in my carboy before bottling.

Thanks!

 

[cmason1957]

I've never had skeeter pee drop tartaric acid crystals. But even if I had, I wouldn't worry about them. They are harmless and don't cause any problems whatsoever. I have seen them in commercial wines.

 

[crabjoe]

I've never had skeeter pee drop tartaric acid crystals. But even if I had, I wouldn't worry about them. They are harmless and don't cause any problems whatsoever. I have seen them in commercial wines.

Thank you!!

 

[user 36973]

I'm still reading about making wine and I found that crystals can form when you chill wine...

Grape wines can form potassium bitartrate crystals and this is what you sometimes find in wines when they are chilled (or frozen). It is due to excess concentrations of potassium from the juice, metabisulfite and added sorbate combining with the natural tartaric acid present in the grapes. The solubility of the potassium-bitartrate compound is lower at colder temperatures. So, you can prevent this from happening in the bottle by making your blending and acid adjustments along with most of your potassium additions before deep chilling the wine as cold as you can get. If you put the wine into a plastic container, you can even toss it in a chest freezer and freeze it solid. This drops out the crystals in your container rather than your wine bottle.

Other fruit wines don't contain enough tartaric acid to form the potassium bitartrate crystals, unless you've added enough acid blend to the mix which contains tartaric. So, SP should *never* be able to drop tartaric acid crystals since the lemon juice only has citric acid and you'd never need to add acid blend to SP.

However, this doesn't mean that your SP can't drop some other crystal that forms from the citric acid. I've seen my SP form calcium based crystals. The good news there is that the solubility of these is not significantly lower at low temperatures, so tossing it in the fridge won't cause crystals. But they can form slowly with time.