An orange hue? That doesn’t sound good at all. I’ve heard that you shouldn’t “fear the foam” when using Star San but I can’t help but feel like that stuff shouldn’t get mixed in with wine in any quantity.

I think I’m going to switch to potassium metabisulfite as you suggest for my next batch. Thank you for sharing your experience with these sanitizers Freddy.

I’ve used Star San, but I really don’t like it. When I rinsed the bottles before bottling I got a bit of an orange hue to my white wine. I may have had the dose too high, but I just prefer the k-meta. Plus I think it gives a bit of a higher sulfite kick that offsets the loss I get when using the enomatic bottler.

Hi Freddy, thank you for sharing your knowledge here.

The relationship between sulfites and organic wines (as defined by the organizations that control this sort of thing) is complicated. You are quite right that sulfites are a natural bi-product of yeast fermentation. I think that the food industry as a whole is still trying to figure out how to define what can be considered organic and why. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out with wine and sulfites for sure.

Have you ever tried Star San for sanitizing? I’ve mainly used Star San and had good luck with it but I would be interested in knowing if you’ve tried it as well and how you think they compare.

Cheers!

Matt