Reinventing the wheel part B: transfer pumps

Is a rental from a home wine shop an option? What about gravity siphoning to smaller containers? That's be tedious, but cheap!

Tom S

Look into either the last or before last issue of Wine Maker. They had an article about using a pump to not pump the wine, but pump the air out of the carboys, so you set up a vacuum there that will draw the wine into them. IIRC the article was more about filtering (by putting the filter between the carboy and wine, but you do not need the filter in there. Basically you go:

Wine----------------Carboy------------------pump ^ Has a stopper drilled to accept two lines a short one (thta does not go into the carboy) that allows to to evacuate teh carboy and is hooked to the pump and a long one that reaches the bottom of the carboy so that the wine can flow into the bottom of the carboy without splashing.

So you do not need to sterilize the pump, because no liquid will go through it. But now that I think about it, you do not have a vacuum pump, but a fluid pump...so it would not work I guess.

What I like about the above system is that it will also degas your wine in teh process....if you need that type of thing.

I hear that engine hoists (or a hand winch attached to a home-made A-frame or a roof rafter) do a good job of lifting carboys, if you don't mind doing your bottling in the garage (or adjacent to it).

YMMV Gene

bobdrob wrote:

So it seems that while no one has any opinion of the transfer pump (aquarium) and one endorsement for the "real" pump (rental if possible,) and Droopy advocates a 2 step pump with a carboy in between, why shouldn't I carefully pump into a bottling bucket ( w/o splashing & aereation) across the room? I read the winemaker article; while it had good points, I still don't see an intrinsic difference between their 2 step suction pump and our proposed careful impeller drive pump. Would't the "gourmet store bought" pump be the empirical equal of ours? Can anyone argue against pumping?

Well the problem is we do not exactally know what pump you have. No make, model or anything. I guess the only thing I can say about it is that I do not know if the parts inside it are meant to be exposed to alcohol or are ok to be in contact with food.

On thing about aeration...you do not need to splash it around for oxygen to get into your wine. I think that is a misunderstood point. As soon as you expose the wine to oxygen it will begin to aerate, splashign it around just helps it go faster. Diffusion is a concentration dirven process. No oxygen in the wine, you expose it to oxygen and it will fairly quickly begin to absorb oxygen form the air. That is what letting wine breathe is all about. Fifteen min after opening a bottle of wine you can tell the difference. Of course, adding sulfites will help protect the wine, and not splashing it around does as well. An additional note about pumps, is they can aerate the wine as well, since the wine is in contact with the moving parts. This is always a concern with brewers when using pumps. Anyway, that is why I like the vacuum driven pump.

Heck, use the aquarium pump for goodness sake, as long as it's a water pump and not an areator pump that pumps air. My son-in-law bought an expensive winr pump/filter and went back to the aquarium pump because it was faster. An aquarium pump is usually rated for salt water. It certainly is OK for wine.

how about an aquarium air pump to push air into the top of container and cause the liquid to be pushed out thru a hose that runs near the bottom of the tank. Wouldn't that work?

container. I

Is that right. Lord I love it when a concept I have rolling around in my head turns out to be something somebody is doing already.

Alright! a positive endorsement! I bought thepump in question as a redundant back up for my classroom. We used its brother to move water around our fish farm & hydroponic set-up. good volume & speed>

I still say if you have to use a pump, use air or better yet CO2 to push the product out.

It's called counterpressure racking, and it's been around for decades. Many boutique wineries do it using nitrogen instead of air to push wine through an expensive racking tube called a "Bulldog Pup".

There's no more gentle way to move wine except for gravity siphoning, although diaphragm and peristaltic pumps come pretty close.

Tom S

I don't know about that. Activated charcoal sold for aquariums is NOT ok to ingest. Becasue it is ok for fish does not mean that it is ok for people.

Activated charcoal is used in filter systems to clean and deodorize the water. It isn't fed directly to the fish. It isn't "ok for fish" either.

Tom S

I've used 12 volt trailer water pumps before when I needed a small filtering job done, and no harm was done as far as I could see. So use the aquarium pump. Be aware that any centrifugal pump can aerate wine quickly at the beginning and end of the pumping, so a bit of care. Also purists who pump wine dont like high speed spinning devices that smash up long chain molecules that adds to mouth feel. Positive displacement or vacuum pumps are better. Wayne

Well, charcoal & fish aside, thanks for all the thoughts. The family has voted to give the pump a shot. Consensus is that since we're to old to manhandle the cask and don't have room to bottle where it sits, we're going for it. We'll post results around nouveau time. regards, bobby gavone

Really? I guess I have been doing it wrong for all these years.

The point was that if there is any sort of chemical residue on the charcoal it would pollute the water.

And it is OK to ingest activated charcoal. It is often use to treat poisionings and itis sold as a hangover helper. But it is not the same as swallowing aquarium charcoal.