Have you ever watched your bubbler...?

[ToulouseLePlot]

CJJB tells me yeast produces CO2 and alcohol in equal weight in fermentation (First Steps, 1960), I'll work with this until one of you chemists comes up with a better figure.

CO2 weighs 1.977kg per cubic meter at 25° (source - Google).
Bubbles in my plastic bubbler are about 5mm long and the ID is 6mm, so each is 0.14ml in volume.
So each bubble weighs about 0.0003g
5 litres of wine (my demijohn to the neck) weighs about 5 Kg.
12.5%ABV is the equivalent of 9.92% by weight (Google), so my finished DJ should have roughly 500g of alcohol in it.
To produce 500g alcohol CJJB says I need 500g CO2
1,666,667 bubbles of 0.0003g = 500g
At 1 bubble per second, that's 20 days…

OK so, it's quicker than 1 per second to begin, which may explain why it only takes 10 days and the calculation is a bit approximate and maybe the whole thing is flawed, but the thing is, next time you watch your bubbler you know you only have to count to 1,666,667... and it's finished!

Or alternatively, you can worry about the 0.25 cu meters of CO˛ being thrown into the atmosphere - but fortunately that only weighs 500g and a 1 tonne CO˛ offset certificate trades at less than $10 now, so, if you wanted to, your wine could be 'carbon neutral' for about 1p for 4 demijohns. Now that sounds like a real bargain!

[Cellar_Rat]

Nice to see other folks doing math like this. Whats the phrase - oh yeah - 'with wine there is friends'

[Big Dave]

Nice to see other folks doing math like this.

Brilliant!!

your wine could be 'carbon neutral' for about 1p for 4 demijohns.

Double Brilliant!!!!


Great to see other inquisitive minds (with a few spare moments) exploring the processes we all take for granted.

[blocky129]

Was it quiet in Bedford last night?

[NorthernWiner]

LOL. To tell the truth, I'm more of a drinker than a thinker (and occasionally a stinker). I'll leave the maths to others.

[ToulouseLePlot]

Don't mock. Bedford is one of the 'it' places. Every other Thursday a bus goes to Luton.


None come back...

[robwrx]

Don't mock. Bedford is one of the 'it' places. Every other Thursday a bus goes to Luton.


None come back...

I accidentally drove through Luton some years ago. It was with great relief that I emerged out the other side intact.

[ToulouseLePlot]

I just weighed an empty wine bottle: 600g
"The amount of energy required to melt a tonne of glass has fallen to 1.47 MWh" - www.britglass.org.uk/industry
0.68956 metric tons (tonnes) CO2 produced by 1 MWh - https://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/ener...rces/refs.html
Truck: 0.1693 kg of CO2 per ton-mile
Sea-freight: 0.0403 kg of CO2 per ton-mile (both wikipedia)
Factory to port, say, 200m: Port to home, say 200m: China to England, say 6,000m

If I save a bottle from a chum's table and use it for homebrew rather than buying a bottle of wine on the way home, let's assume it has a life of 20 years and is used 3 times a year = equivalent to 60 bottles that don't have to be produced. Just in the melting costs of the glass that saves the world 36 kg of CO2 per bottle. It costs 0.3 tonnes of CO2 to transport 1 tonne of bottles here from a factory in china, so the 60 bottles I prevent being made & transported (36 kg) save 11kg in CO2 - so that's 47kg of CO2 saved just in cost of melting the original glass and shipping it. Let me add 30% for the cost of keeping the lights on in the factories, driving the bus that takes the workers in, turning the glass into bottles, re-working the failures, stocking, marketing, accounting and then disposing. That's 61 kg or 15 bottles saves a tonne of CO2.

So, for every 15 bottles we wash and scrub up, for our - the most perfect recycling activity - we save 1 tonne of CO2 emmissions. Probably twice as much if you think about the waste and put detail into the sums about extracting the raw materials and so on.

We deserve a medal!

Cheers

[cpfan]

We deserve a medal!

Yes but the environmental savings would be blown by the costs of making the medal, delivering it to you, and having some politician make a speech about it while he/she wonders where you keep the wine and can he/she/it have a few swallows before going on to the next appointment.

Steve

[WVMountaineerJack]

Wouldnt it be easier to weigh your carboy before fermentation starts and then after degassing, then you only need to figure out 2 numbers and no counting, thats my kind of math. Crackedcork

[DaveH]

I accidentally drove through Luton some years ago. It was with great relief that I emerged out the other side intact.

*AHEM*

Don't ya be dissing my home town!!!

"You can take the boy out of Luton, but you can't take the Luton out of the boy....."

or something...........

Besides, Mid-beds is where it's at! We've even got our own vineyard don't ya know!!!

[robwrx]

No offence meant Dave but the car plant end of town late on a Saturday night is not particularly picturesque is it

[Cellar_Rat]

Saturday night

are you suggesting it more picturesque in the daylight?

[goldseal]

I heard that the reason that there was a car factory in Luton was to allow the locals to leave more quickly.

[lockwood1956]

lol

love it!