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I am in the process of making a batch of Birdwatchers Sugar Wash and I was wondering if I could speed up the process. Has anyone ever tried filtering a sugar wash with a buon vino mini jet or anything similar?

Link here if you dont know what I am talking about http://www.buonvino.com/P_MiniJet.shtml

I make my own wine as well and use the filter to speed up my clearing and make it crystal clear. It seems like it would be easy enough to rack into a secondary and then filter without having to wait for it to clear. Never filtered anything that close to a primary fermentation but its just sugar and yeast. Any thoughts?

That contraption is intended to add "shine" or "sparkle" to already racked wines by removing the small amount of solids remaining suspended, thus making them more transparent... It would not work well as an alternative to allowing a fermented wash to clear and then racking, perhaps more than once... It can only collect so much sediment before clogging and even small batches would contain more than enough trub to muck things up...

you want it faster,make another wash,or two.

Dnderhead wrote:you want it faster,make another wash,or two.

Bingo Sir,,,,as always.

Duty cycle 3-4 fermenting buckets and you'll nearly always have something ready at any given stage of your hobby operation...Once your cycling,,,,,,its like free power/energy/filters or sumpin like that there You can then move slower to produce more

Interesting post.

Giving this gentleman the benefit of the doubt. I would beg to differ with you guys.

Assuming he has reasonably cleared his wash to the level of his experience with wine and this machine is designed for just this application, I believe he could utilize it quite affectively. What we might call clear, he may be able by benefit of this device to clear it further. We ALL agree that a cleaner wash makes a cleaner distillate.

My two and a half cents.

MR

What does a filter cartridge cost? I think you will use a few to get 5 gallons of sugar wash brilliantly clear.

Well I have quite a few extra pads so I really have nothing to lose. They cost about 3 bucks each for the coarse ones. Ive never used the medium or fine as the coarse does a fantastic job its self. I can always loosen up on the pad clamps if the flow gets too slow. I think ill rack to a secondary then give it a whirl. The wash is on its 3rd day now and its pretty stiff, but smells wonderful and already has a good alcohol flavor. I will post my results here, Although I have to think that rad might be right and its just too much lees still in suspension.

I have a filter,used only a few times,(like when I used powdered spice) but you have to let wine "clear" before using the filter.
or it just plugs the plates.then if its that clear its good enough for distilling.

I've always wondered about filtering. It would be nice to hear what difference (if any) there is with and without filtering. Seeing that you already have the filter then why not.

Well the filtering didn't go so well.

What my wash looked like before racking. (I had to finally link the pictures, as the img process on this site is horrible. Apparently there is a 800 X 500 size limit and after resizing to 640 X 480 it still says it was too big. Really a 800 X 500 size limit on externally linked pics? I could understand if the pics where hosted locally on the homestiller.org site, but I am hosting the pics. and why 800 X 500? such a strange size limit and so small. Its 2011, not 1994 where everyone is on dial up)

http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h320/ ... M_0796.jpg

A better view with the wash in the racking cane.

http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h320/ ... M_0797.jpg

As long as the filter lasted, i did get good results. Compare whats coming out with whats above.

http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h320/ ... M_0804.jpg

It started off well, but I had to wash the filters out about every 300 mils and there was no way I was going to do that for a 26l batch, plus the filters are paper and they started to fall apart after 5 washings. Here they are after I gave up. I ended up with maybe a gallon filtered and a lot of work.

http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h320/ ... M_0805.jpg

I also tried filtering it through my finest brewing straining bag, but that didnt filter anything. I guess the yeast were too fine. I think with a bit of a coarser filter it would have worked better or with a fabric type of filter, but thats a project for another day.

Nice follow-up thanks for sharing your results!

maddyn99, as for the images sizes, they are what they are - at least for now... This is a very busy site and we do get a lot of images posted here... Perhaps some day we will be able to allow larger images but we have found in the past that doing so made folks too lazy to crop images so they are only displaying what we really need to see...

As for the filters, your results have confirmed my original concerns that they can only filter out so much solids... They would work better as a secondary or tertiary filter... There is no substitute for time and gravity...

I'm convinced that a filter would work, I just haven't found the right one yet.

The coarse filter is a 6 micron filter, I think I will try something like this next.

http://www.cfsco.net/fibagsvowvob2.htmll

Should be able to suspend that over a open container and let gravity do the rest. That is a 5 micron filter and should work at least as well and for 5 bucks Ill give it a shot. Looks likes once it gets full you can just empty it by turning it inside out and dumping it.

Umm, yeah, but time is like FREE...

I thought you were going to filter a cleared wash through the finest filter to polish before stilling. Now time is free but even the clearest wash I ever ran had some haze in it and I was wondering if micro filtering it would make a difference, for better or worse.

Weve made the birdwatchers recipe over a dozen times. We used to take a white cotton shirt, put it over the still and then pour the wash over the shirt. The shirt would eventually clog and we would just replace it with a clean one. We tried to eliminate filtering the wash and we get great results, product comes out very clean like crystal clear shine. This is being done through a VM column packed with copper mesh. Hope this helps in your process.

Bagasso wrote:I thought you were going to filter a cleared wash through the finest filter to polish before stilling. Now time is free but even the clearest wash I ever ran had some haze in it and I was wondering if micro filtering it would make a difference, for better or worse.

Sorry for the confusion. There is no need to test on a cleared wash, I do that all the time with wine making. If the wash is clear enough to see through (or even close) it will make it super clear on even the coarse filter. I would be hesitant to run it on anything finer unless its a simple sugar wash as the finer filtering can and will remove flavorings. I don't have a batch of wine fermenting ATM as I am using my primary fermenter to do another batch of BW sugar wash.

However I have a good example of a filtered wine. This wine has been through the primary fermenter, then in a secondary for about 3 weeks, then filtered and in the secondary again for about another 3 weeks.

http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h320/ ... M_0812.jpg

with the light off and a flash light

http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h320/ ... M_0811.jpg

It is a blush wine so its a bit red, but you get the point. Its super super clear with no bentonite, super klear or other clearing agents. Notice how there is zero lees's at the bottom of the secondary. At this point its just bulk aging after only a single filtering.

i thought a beer 1 micron filter could be used on BW

i have thought about the idea to use a sanke keg to hold the wash and pressurize it with air from a compressor to push it through the filter rather than rely on gravity.

never tried it as i don't have the compressor...

often wondered how a really clean filtered wash wash would effect the end product