A few months ago, I described an easy way to clean a large fermenter, and concluded that, “It takes very little time and effort on your part, leaving you free to make more wine!” I wasn’t wrong about that, but there is a little snag lurking in that happy and optimistic statement: you have to actually take the time and make the effort or it won’t get done. It’s a problem I hinted at in my article on washing bottles, when I talked about setting bottles aside “until I can wash them.”
Sad but true: They won’t clean themselves
It turns out that a lot of things get set aside for a not-quite-as-brief-as-I’d-hoped interval. I know you bachelors out there are confused, “Just do that later, we’ve got wine to make!” you’re thinking. I know because that’s what I thought. But, stay with me for a minute, what happens when the things you need to make wine with need cleaning? What happens when other things, that you may not need right now, form a physical barrier in your wine making room? Right now there’s a 5-gallon bucket filled with water sitting in my utility sink. The place I’d move it to, next to the sink, is occupied by more buckets that need cleaning. The other side of the sink? One-gallon jugs that need to be cleaned. Some of you may have realized where I’m going with this. Sometimes you’ve got to do the cleaning today so you can make wine later.