My barrel ate the lees stirrer

You could fish it out with a hook, tongs, grappling rod, or a miniature scuba diver, but why bother? Plastic is relatively inert. Wait until you have a better reason to rack, and meanwhile, use another piece of plastic.

LOL! I did the exact same thing earlier this year. I just left it in there and built a new one. Mine's stainless - not plastic. I chuck it in an electric drill for stirring.

Tom S

I like the miniature scuba diver idea. I just put an ad on craigslist, so let's see what I come up with. In the meantime I guess the "relatively" part of "relatively inert" is what concerns me. I am not planning on racking until I bottle in about 10 months and I don't know what the impact is of leaving in a piece of plastic. I'd hate to have 300 bottles of slightly plastic-y wine. If I only had a really long pair of chopsticks.

Yeah, I have (or had, well I guess still have) the same one. As it dropped out of the drill everything went in slow motion... seemed like it lasted 15 seconds and then glub-glub-glub and it was gone in the murky depths of a barrel of pinot. If it were stainless I'd have no problem just leaving it. I am a bit concerned about leaving plastic anything in wine for a year.

Re: miniature scuba diver --- I was thinking of Rachel Welch (Fantastic Journey). :)

Not having seen the stirring rod, I can only speculate, but I doubt that you will have any more of a plastic-y flavour from leaving it there than from stirring with it. I.e. you won't notice the difference. [I hope this theory is true, because I have a 10" length of plastic tubing in the bottom of one of my carboys, and tubing has more of a "plastic-y" odor than stirring rod.]

If you want it out that badly, take a 4' piece of 3/4" x 1/16" steel, and bend it in half around a 3/4" pipe (i.e. round the inside end, rather than kinking it). If you can slightly round the two ends (spoon like), it will be easier to grip it. That will give you a nice pair of spring-loaded tongs (better than chopsticks unless you have a very strong thumb). Steel is oiled before storage, so clean it with ammonia, and then rinse it well before putting it in your wine. [Even then, it will probably do more flavour damage than plastic.]

Scrap that idea. Get a couple of 2' pieces of 1" x 1/8" hardwood, and put a hinge on one end (or just wire the two pieces together). Insert a spring a few inches below the hinge/wire. If you can't grip the rod properly, you can soak the ends, and bend them slightly to form the "fingers". The hardwood will do zero damage to your wine.

I would still recommend waiting until next racking.

If I were you I wouldn't leave that tubing in the bottom of that carboy, for just the reason you stated. I'm not even crazy about using plastic tubing for pumping wine around, but there doesn't seem to be any reasonable alternative.

The stirrer in question is of unknown material, but it's probably a rigid plastic such as PVC, Nylon etc. Those don't seem to be a problem for long term contact with wine.

Tom S

Yea, but how are you going to get the scuba diver out before the wine is all gone?

Ray

Good one!

You know as well as I do that the very first thing that will happen is I will drop in whatever I'm using to fish out the lees stirrer. I'll fret about it this week and take your inspiration, go to the hardware store and assemble a lees stirrer remover. Tom, I'll ship it off to you when I'm done.

If you make your "fish" sufficiently long, it won't be able to fall in. Alternately, you can tie a long cord to the end, so --- if it does fall in --- you can pull it out.

Rather than trying to shape the ends of the hardwood into "fingers" (as I suggested earlier), take a pair of "ice tongs", and attach it's "fingers" to the end of your hardwood.

But before doing all that construction, if your "stirrer" has something which you can hook, why not try a (long) piece of wire, with the end bent into a "v". That may work.

Don't scuba divers pee in their wet suits to keep themselves warm? If so I think the plastic stirrer is the least of the worries.

'H'

That's about what I did. I took a 3' piece of wood and attached a straightened piece of trellis wire near the end of the wood. Then I made a little hook at the end and blindly fished around for awhile. Everytime I would make contact and start to bring up the stirrer from the murky depths, it would fall back down. Then about 15 minutes later, I was bringing it up... it tugged, I pulled hard, it put up a good fight, but finally I'm pleased to announce that that I snagged one of the four 1/2" holes on the head of the stirrer and brought it in - 6.5 oz! I'm having it mounted.

Thanks to everyone for the engineering advice.