Stop Fermentation with "UV Filter" ?

New to the forum ... I've been reading the stickies and hearing a lot about the UV-pasteurized juice that some of you are starting with.

I see products on the market such as this:

http://www.freshwatersystems.com/p-4499-minipure-min-1-1-gpm-ultraviolet-water-purifier.aspx

(Rated at 1 gpm - $309)

Do you think this would stop fermentation?

thanks

Hmm, I guess it would. But for $300, I'd rather crash cool, or do the stovetop hot water bath.

You could also just consider very fine micron filtration. Yeah, that will strip out some other stuff too, but it is a lot cheaper than $309. Also, as that is meant for drinking water, I would wonder how it would handle the much higher microbial load in fermenting juice. Might have to slow it down a lot to get 100% kill.

Edcculus said:

Hmm, I guess it would. But for $300, I'd rather crash cool, or do the stovetop hot water bath.

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Cold crash doesn't kill yeast. It just creates an artificial stuck fermentation that could always start back up again under the right conditions.

Find some sodium benzoate.

UV pasteurizing might be worth looking at. Its what the good cider orchards to pasteurize the raw juice and is nearly impossible to taste (with raw juice). Whether this unit would do as good a job as the commercial units is TBD. Commercial units for fresh cider are a lot more expensive - ~10K, but they handle more volume than this. However for personal use, a 5 gallon carboy in 5min is pretty reasonable, although as beerific mentioned, you may need to slow it down to get the kill rate you need.

By the time you get some food grade pumps, you're probably looking at more like 500 bucks. If you can spare the cash, it would be worthwhile to check it out IMHO. First though, you probably want to find out how strong this thing is and how it compares to a commercial UV pasteurizer in terms of strength.

Assuming you can incapacitate the yeast with this thing, you will still need to figure a way to clear the cider. Cider is fairly cloudy when it is fermenting, and if you want to stop it with some residual sugar it will still be fermenting so will be cloudy. That the problem with filtering - you need one pass to get out all the large particulates before you can filter fine enough to get the yeast out and even then you still burn up a lot of filters.

Cold crashing doesnt kill the yeast. If you do it properly - it removes the yeast. But it does require fridge space and a bit of practice. You also need the right yeast (although most ale and wheat yeasts crash fairly easily). As far as whether it can start back up - I guess that is where the skill comes in. I have not had problems. YMMV.

Thanks for the replies.

A few thoughts:

1) I'm considering buying one of these for water use (to compliment the RO filter that I use); I wouldn't drop $300 on a UV filter if my only intended use was to attempt to sanitize cider.

2) I absolutely don't want to use chemicals... which is why I am brewing my own cider.

3) The UV filter I posted is rated at 1 gpm (for water). I agree, I would probably want a slower flowrate to handle the increased microbial load of the cider. I'm assuming that since the UV filter is intended to be connected to a water line, it has it's own flow limiter (that limits the flow to the rated 1 gpm). I doubt I would need to buy a food-grade pump (although I have access to some free ones), because my problem will be REDUCING the flowrate down from 1 gpm to perhaps 0.1 gpm. I'm sure I could do that low-tech with gravity (trial and error to achieve desired flowrate) or high-tech (some kind of flow limiter - I'm familiar with the ones made for gas; not sure if there is one for liquid).

Anyway, my question was mainly academic; if I do buy this, I'll post results. In the meantime I'll try honey (per CvilleKevin's mega-thread), cold-crashing, and racking to clear.

patriqq said:

2) I absolutely don't want to use chemicals... which is why I am brewing my own cider.

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I understand completely (I sorta feel the same). But isn't everything chemical? For example, I use a lot of this:

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

Yes, a good point. Obviously everything we have on earth is either naturally occurring or derived from naturally occurring substances. I don't have a problem with the "naturally occurring" part; the issue lies in the "derived" part.

H20 is naturally occurring. It can be lab synthesized. I would not consider lab synthesized water "natural," even though any metric we use to measure/compare it's qualities to natural water would yield no difference.

By "chemical," I meant a substance that is fabricated in a lab using "unnatural" methods. Of course, the phrase "unnatural" is completely subjective, so all I can really do is clarify my interpretation/opinion.

And of course, "natural" doesn't mean it's good for you (or the environment). Crude oil is natural.

From a philosophy standpoint, my rules would be something like this:

I am willing to use anything that is naturally occurring, or anything that is derived from a naturally occurring substance (or substances) using certain "crude" methods such as:

-heating
-cooling
-distillation/condensation/evaporation etc
-mixing, grinding, blending, powdering, dissolving etc (obviously substances may react with one another at this point...)
-cultivating (farming, fermenting, etc
-crude extraction (dissolving etc).
-pressurizing

(this is an incomplete list)

So as I define it, the following would be "natural" aka "not chemical":

Oil
Gunpowder
Any mined mineral (note some organic growing standards ban some mined substances)
Uranium

(again, an incomplete list)

Obviously my opinions are completely subjective and may seem arbitrary to someone else.

passedpawn said:

I understand completely (I sorta feel the same). But isn't everything chemical? For example, I use a lot of this:

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

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That nasty Dihydrogen monoxide finds its way into everything! It's criminal how freely they use this stuff!

diver165 said:

that nasty dihydrogen monoxide finds its way into everything! It's criminal how freely they use this stuff!

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lol