Dry Ice Bottling

[gc605]

Heard something interesting in class today...

In the days before vacuum bottling, the Australians used small pieces of dry ice in their bottles as a way of eliminating oxygen in the headspace. Has anyone every heard of/done that? Is there a safe level to add before one risks carbonation?

 

[masta]

Found this article: http://www.smalloak.com/papers/inertgas/inertgas.html




As home wine makers very few if any have the equipment or worry about inerting our bottles while filling. You would have to add the winethen thedry ice and wait for it to sublime and hope it purges the head space and doesn't dissolve into the liquid.


Proper purging of the air (21% oxygen) from a head space above a liquid really needs to be done by multiple pressurizing and venting cycles or by evacuating the air by means of vacuum. During fermentation the large amount CO2 being produced keeps the air out of the head space and when the gas production slows this is why we move it to avessel with an airlock to prevent the air from getting backinto the head space.Edited by: masta

 

[sangwitch]

when I worked for budweiser distributer in ct we would get boxes of dry ice that would come in on the keg trailers and we would make bombs out of 2-liter soda bottles. Take a bottle, adda littlewater, jam a few chunks of dry ice through the hole, cap it and throw the bottle into an empty trailer (for echo). boom.

 

[PeterZ]

Here's an idea if you have a source of dry ice. Before bottling, after the bottles have been rinsed with sulfite, put a small piece of dry ice in each, and let it sublime. Cover the open bottles with a towel while this takes place. The CO2 from the dry ice in the bottom will push most of the air out of the bottle, leaving CO2.

Fill the bottles as you normally would. In the headspace will be CO2 instead of air. The amount of CO2 will be too small to carbonate the wine, but might significantly reduce "bottling shock."