wood chips

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

phatuna

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2009
Messages
793
Reaction score
6
Location
San Diego
do the wood chips go directly into the wine or do they need to be sanatized somehow w/bourbon or vodka?
 
Though a quick steaming for 10 minutes certainly wouldn't hurt. A buddy of mine soured a perfectly good Arrogant Bastard clone by putting the chips in raw.

The comments I made were coming from a winemaker's standpoint, since this is a wine making subforum. I don't claim to know about adding oak chips to beer but I do know that in the dozens of wines and meads I've made and the hundreds that I know from other winemakers, I've never heard of a batch of wine or wine-strength mead being infected from oak chips, beans, staves, or sticks. I'm not saying it never happens, but I personally have never heard of it happening.
 
Yeah, for wine I've never even thought about sanitizing chips.

When I buy them, they come in sealed packages. If I only used 1/2 of them, maybe I'd sanitize them before using. (Nah, probably not). I guess it depends on where they come from, and how they are kept.

For beer, I have sanitized(?) the chips a bit by soaking in brandy or bourbon for my AB clone. The problem with sanitizing them is that the "oakiness" is pulled out into the sanitizing liquid. If you ever soak the oak chips in liquid, you'll see what I mean. So, I wouldn't want to soak them and discard the liquid. I guess steaming them would work, but I've never thought about it.

Maybe a spray with a sulfite solution would work if you really wanted to sanitize them.
 
I wonder if micro-waving for a minutes would do the trick? My understanding is a micro-wave quickly destroys bacteria because it causes their cell-walls to explode.
 
Back
Top