question about straining wine must

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ksvet06

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Hello everyone I made a mistake with my mulberry wine and have a lot of seeds floating around in my must right now. I have been thinking of two different ways of straining them off when i rack to the secondary tonight. First one is using a coffee filter and splash racking to help degas at the same time. Second was using a nylon bag of the the end of the hose to strain the seeds out. Any advice or ideas would be helpful lol.

ksvet06 :se
 
Hi ksvet, Two possible suggestions. You could tie a filter at the target end of your siphon - something like one of those bags you might add hops to in beer making. My concern would be that a simple filter would quickly fill with the seeds and prevent your wine from flowing into the target carboy but if you filtered through a hop bag or some other kind of bag and if the bag was large enough to accommodate all the seeds then the bag would not in fact block the flow.

The other suggestion is to create a whirlpool in your source carboy by stirring with a long spoon or paddle. The whirlpool will result in the seeds tending to collect towards the middle of the carboy - like tea-leaves in a stirred cup of tea - and you then siphon from the edge. Now if you have a large stir plate and a magnetic stirrer I think (but am not certain) that you might be able to keep this whirlpool effect going until you complete the racking thus avoiding the vast majority of the seeds. Without such a stir plate I suspect the seeds will slowly move back from the center so a filter may be a useful adjunct.
 
How big of a batch is this? I would get a 5-gallon paint strainer bag from the hardware store. Place that into a bucket and then pour the wine through it. It should catch the seeds.

A coffee filter will take way too long and will clog easily.
 
Depending upon how small the seeds are you can always try a spaghetti strainer. Incorporate that and a mesh bag if they are small.
 
thank you to everyone here for the responses. I ended up using a nylon straining bag and watched it the whole time to make sure that there was no clogs and that the wine was flowing good. racked into carboys today so hopefully all went good and as planned.
 

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