Be part of our community & join our international next generation forum now!
Hi all,
I am trying to figure out what to do before bottling, I was looking to run the product through a 5 micron followed by a .5 micron filter bag before bottling to eliminate any small floaters from either the barrel or from our charcoal filter. I have seen a few different methods from a plate filter to cartridge. I have thought of using bag filters in a drum.
Is this something people have done?
Comments
I don't know what your application (and size of operation) is but if you're using EnoMatic / EnoMaster for bottling, I believe both of these systems have an option for inline filtering
I used a 1 micron filter for Enolmaster.
However, this is for white spirits, the filter housing will probably clog once I start making gins with fruit added post distillation. In which case I'll need to do filtering before bottling.
We are not using enomatic or enomaster for bottling. we are only bottling about 50 gallons at a time. We are using a 6 Spout Gravity Filling Machine for bottling. I figure we could pass the product through a 5 micron filter bag first then through a .5 and then pump directly into our bottle filler.
If you have quite a bit of sediment, I would recommend polishing it up a bit with either 5 micron or 1 micron filters, then do a final filtration on the front end of your bottler.
I don’t know that I’d trust a half micron bag filter.
I use standard 10' pleated water filters I buy online. First a 1 micron then a fine 0.2 micron in series. Research the filter materials and housings for Ethanol resistance. With clear spirits they seem to last forever, with barreled products I generally get around 2000 bottles before they are too plugged with barrel dust to flow. Cheap and easy to use. I run them in series from the holding tank to the filters to the pump to my 6 place filler. The pump draws the spirit through the filter vs pushing through the filter.
The following may put things in better perspective.
A filter bag has a filtration efficiency of approx. 60%. The pleated filter cartridges often mentioned and used herein are nominal rated and do not generally exceed 99% efficiency. The better solution but costs way more is to use absolute rated, Beta 5,000, 99.98% efficient cartridges.
Generally the pricier the cartridge also means that it has rigid inner and outer pleat support. With this support you can back-flush the cartridge to extend its filter life.