Post your Crush Day Photos!!!

pgentile · Sep 23, 2017

My second crush day was almost three weeks ago, not new photos, but I thought my high tech crushing and destemming would be a good contrast to these lower tech ops previously posted. The first shot includes my custom made Italian 2x4 crusher and American made stainless manual destemmer.

Ajmassa · Sep 23, 2017

How much work is involved with that? Seems like it would be a lot. Especially working solo.
When I was a kid the old timers would use a wooden hand crank crusher right into the open barrel to ferment, stems and all. Nice and easy.
In May we removed the grapes off the stems of before crushing. In 45 mins i barely made a dent. 2 more helpers still took another hour. For 1.5 lugs.
This time I rented the crusher and fished out maybe 90% of the stems by hand after crushing. Less work, but still work.
Still trying to find my way-- each batch is a whole new learning experience.

pgentile · Sep 23, 2017

288 lbs(biggest crush to date) kicked my butt this year even though half was done on Saturday and the half on the following Wednesday. Now I do less upfront than my first all grape batches. The first batches I did were destemmed by hand and then crush via 2x4. Had help of 3 family members then still took a couple hours. Now I do it solo and put whole clusters in fermenters and crush with 2x4 and then over the next few days pull out the stems during punch downs as the grapes come off easy. No vegetal characteristics imparted so far.

But in the spring, and going forward, I will be either renting or buying a C/D and/or press.

sour_grapes · Sep 23, 2017

Thanks, Craig, but I am a bit confused. A 20 gallon trash can won't fit 200 pounds of water let alone berries. Also, I cannot fit that (upright) in my car, nor can I lift it.

I have a food-grade 55 gallon drum (and dolly) that I was planning to ferment in, and was planning to use the buckets to schlep into and out of. Of course, I don't mind buying, say, a 32 or 44 gallon Brute, but that doesn't solve my transportation problem.

Ajmassa · Sep 23, 2017

The buckets worked great for me. We've saved all our juice pails over the years, so I've got an absurd amount on hand. One can never have enough buckets! A lug fit a 5 or 6 gal bucket perfectly.
And I'm pretty sure he didn't realize your crushing and fermenting at different locations. Take pics!

Boatboy24 · Sep 23, 2017

sour_grapes said:
Even crushed grapes? I admit to not knowing WFT I am talking about here, never having done this. In particular, I do not know exactly how the grapes for our group purchase will be transported, i.e., in lugs or not. My understanding of the delivery day is that we will all go to one guy's house, the truck meets us there, we use his crusher/destemmer, and take our C/D grapes home. A friend who has done this before said he used his fermenter to transport last year, but it was awkward, so he is using buckets this year.

I do have 2 or 3 buckets from juice and fermenting buckets, but I think I will need about 6 or 7. I am buying 200 lbs. of fruit.

Then yes, you're in the bucket business. For the last few years, that is exactly what I've done. Show up with empty, closed buckets that have half a cup or so of KMeta solution, then dump it out before the crushed grapes go it.

cmason1957 · Sep 23, 2017

Here's a few pictures from what my wife and I did today. Picked up 200 lbs of St. Vincent and 300 lbs of Chambourcin. My wife and I are going to make the St. Vincent and half the Chambourcin into rose. We spent about four hours after we got home pressing the rose.

Arne · Sep 27, 2017

sour_grapes said:
Thanks, Craig, but I am a bit confused. A 20 gallon trash can won't fit 200 pounds of water let alone berries. Also, I cannot fit that (upright) in my car, nor can I lift it.

I have a food-grade 55 gallon drum (and dolly) that I was planning to ferment in, and was planning to use the buckets to schlep into and out of. Of course, I don't mind buying, say, a 32 or 44 gallon Brute, but that doesn't solve my transportation problem.

I bought some 10 gal. trash cans from Home depot this year. They should work good for transporting, just don't fill them all the way or they are going to be pretty heavy. Also the lids do not fit that tight. Biggest problem with them was we had to order them thru the store, so you do not get them right away. Arne.

cmason1957 · Sep 27, 2017

It is true that 200 lbs of grapes won't fit into a 20 gallon trash can. I had three 20 gallons and one 30 gallon trash can. That just barely fits in my Honda CRV. Two in the backseat, two all the way in the back. I had about 100-150 lbs in each trash can and that is just about the limit of what my wife and I can muscle into and then out of the car. That plus a dolly to move them from driveway to basement for fermenting. The lids fit tight enough and they weren't full enough to worry about sloshing, although we did have some discussions about what might happen if we had to slam on the brakes.

NCWC · Sep 27, 2017

2017 Begins

Ajmassa · Sep 27, 2017

Loving this thread

ceeaton · Sep 27, 2017

Ajmassa5983 said:
Loving this thread

Yea, everyone looks like they are having fun but me....chose to skip grapes this Fall since I'm low on carboy space and time. Oldest heading to San Antonio early next week, get a butt check later next week (colonoscopy due to cancer in family history). Have plenty to bottle but very few clean bottles. Working on that. I'll live vicariously through the rest of you, keep posting those images!