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Winemaking is a sensitive process that’s subject to many factors from grape varietals, to fermentation details, to the wood used in aging barrels. Sanitation is also an important contributor to wine flavor, quality, and safety. Following proper maintenance and cleaning practices helps ensure the finished product meets winemaker and consumer expectations.
While there are several ways to keep barrels, vessels, and other equipment clean, steam sanitization stands out as an efficient and safe method. Here, we’ll look at the ways in which wineries can use steam for cleaning and the advantages of investing in steam generation equipment for winery sanitation.
Maintaining Wine Equipment
As in many other industries where precision operations and product quality are paramount, winemaking involves specialized equipment that must be properly maintained. Part of the maintenance process is cleaning and sanitizing wood barrels, stainless steel vine vessels, bottling lines, and flexible tubing. This helps to protect complex wine flavors and prevent entire batches from spoilage or sub-par quality. As a result, equipment stays in top condition for longer, and the risk of losing income due to a failed product decreases.
Regular sanitization is a critical part of the winemaking process in order to remove residue, debris, tannins, and impurities that can affect wine taste and quality. It’s important to clean barrels after every full discharge, and to clean unused barrels every one to two years to deodorize and remove any lingering bacteria or contaminants. Stainless steel tanks, bottling equipment, flexible tubing, and other equipment also need regular deep cleaning.
Hot water washing is a traditional cleaning method. Unfortunately, it is not always effective because the water doesn’t get into all areas of barrels and tanks. What’s more, temperatures may be insufficient to kill harmful or undesirable yeast, molds, and microbes. Even high pressure hot water may miss residues or sediment that has built up.
Chemical agents such as chlorine bleach, potassium and sodium metabisulfite, and even ozone can be effective. However, strong acids, bases and toxic compounds are harsh on equipment, unpleasant or dangerous for employees, and require thorough and careful rinsing to remove any trace of residue. Chemicals not only impact flavors and product quality, but they can be unsafe to consume. Beyond this, chemical washing processes are water intensive and risk damage to the equipment if they remain in contact with it too long or are improperly diluted. Stainless steel in particular can pit or discolor with prolonged exposure to certain chemicals.
So what’s a better solution? Dry saturated steam.
The Role of Electric Steam Generators
Steam sanitization offers an effective, efficient alternative to hot water and chemicals that is also eco-friendly. Dry saturated steam reaches high temperatures quickly and gets to all cleanable surfaces in barrels, tubing, and tanks without causing pitting, corrosion, or other damage. It can even remove tartrate from barrel walls and penetrate the wood to kill harmful molds and bacteria.
Unlike standard wet steam, dry steam holds less than 5% moisture when it reaches saturation temperature. Liquid water in the steam is converted to vapor, so moisture-sensitive equipment stays dry and corrosion risk is minimal. An electric dry steam generator can reach temperatures above 200°F, which is far higher than most pathogens can survive.
Wineries that use steam clean winery equipment can experience several benefits, including:
- Portability: With an on-board water tank, steam generator units are available when and where they’re needed without removing or dismantling equipment.
- On-Board Water Tank: Unlike boiler-fed systems that may require protective additives or other agents that can be transmitted into the cleaning steam, our generators use a built-in tank to create a continuous supply of dry steam from plain water.
- Versatility: Clean wooden barrels, stainless steel tanks, flexible tubing, and mixed-material equipment with one simple cleaning tool.
- Environmentally Friendly: Dry steam cleaning uses less water than traditional methods because smaller quantities of water are converted to steam, and rinse water is reduced or eliminated.
- No chemicals: Steam is a powerful cleaner without the need to add bleach or other harmful chemicals. Steam is also residue-free so traces of cleaners don’t contaminate equipment or wine.
- Efficiency: Dry steam reaches high temperatures to quickly kill pathogens and break down tartrates and other accumulated wastes from the fermenting process. Surfaces also dry quickly after steam cleaning, so they are ready for use sooner.
At Electro-Steam, we carry a selection of dry steam generator equipment and accessories that make it simple to establish a process and routine for cleaning and maintaining winemaking equipment. Our winery steam generators are available with different power ratings and water tank capacities, and have these user-friendly features:
- High- and low-pressure selector so operators can easily alternate between low pressure (1.3 bar/19 psi) for use with wooden barrels or high pressure (3.5 bar/80 psi) for use with steel
- A 7.5 (109 psi) safety relief valve
- Low-level cut-off with an alarm
Learn even more about why to steam clean wine barrels in our blog.
Contact Electro-Steam for Winery Steam Generators
Having an electric steam generator on hand in your facility makes it easy to clean equipment in place, right when the need arises. Maintain safety and protect your wine brand with the power of dry saturated steam.
Electro-Steam specializes in high-performance steam generation solutions for commercial and industrial applications. Each of our units is made in the USA and meets or exceeds ASME and CE standards.
Contact us today to learn more about our electric steam generators.
