Making your own wine is a fantastic hobby. There’s nothing as enjoyable as tasting a glass of delicious wine that you made yourself. One way you can up your winemaking game is by filtering. Today we’re going to talk about using a filter to improve the clarity of your wine. Filtering has a lot of issues around it. It’s almost the last thing you should do to your wine before you bottle it. You’ve got to let the wine be almost completely clear before it goes through the Buon vino mini jet wine filter. That’s because filtering isn’t designed to clear wine. Filtering is designed to polish the best way to think of it. A perfectly fine wine that looks clear in the carboy is like a freshly washed car. Shiny looks good, and everyone is pleased. But filtered wine is more like a freshly waxed car. You can tell the difference between wash and wax right away. The wax looks excellent, but you can’t wax a dirty car. It has to be clean first. And the same goes for your wine. If it’s cloudy and full of particles and suspension, your filter pads are going to plug up, and you’re not going to have success. So filtering comes after finding when the wine is already completely clear.
Can Buon Vino Mini Jet Wine Filter Damage the Flavor or Aroma or Color?
Now some people are concerned that filtering can strip flavor or aroma, or color. This isn’t true. The kind of filter pads that are available to the home winemaker isn’t tight enough to take out aroma flavor or color molecules. They simply can’t. If you ever use a filter and look at the pads and see that there’s a deposit either of a purplish or pinkish color from red wines or amber or beige color from whites, that’s not color. Those are yeast cells and colloidal proteins that have been suspended in the wine that has absorbed color from it. You’re taking them out, and they would normally settle out and form a deposit later on if you didn’t filter. So filtering is good for wine, and it makes it look fabulous. There are a bunch of different machines in the market that will fill your wine. All of them rely on depth filtration media, which is a type of filter pad. There are manual models and large impressive high-speed models. But for most purposes, the Buon Vino Mini Jet Filter is going to accomplish the job quickly, easily, and with a minimum of fuss.
Here’s the mini-jet out of the box.
It consists of a small gear pump on this side which picks the wine up to be filtered and pushes it through this hose into a set of plates. These plates are used to hold filter pads. The wine goes through them. The cloudy material is trapped by the filter pad itself, and it comes out. This ejects the port into the clean carboy.
What Type of Pad You’ll Be Using
When you’re filtering, one of the first choices you have to make is what type of pad you’ll be using. Filter pads from Buon Vino come in three grades. One, two, and three. One is the coarsest. It’s intended for use in fruit wines. In some other specialty applications, it’s not suitable for use. On kit wines, you’ll almost never use it. The number two pad, however, is your workhorse. This pad is good for all red wines from kits, and most of the whites they’ll go through easily and they’ll clear up beautifully.
But if you wish to filter an iced wine and you want to get this filtered gorgeously clear for the glass, then you are going to use number three pads. Number three pads are very fine. They will, in one pass, retain almost all of the three e-cells and any colloidal material, and the wine will be sparkling brightly in a single pass. Keep in mind that the efficiency of a filter pad is directly related to how much material it takes out. That is to say; the number three pads will polish the wine most brilliantly. But if it’s slightly cloudy, they’ll plug up much quicker. 
Clean the Buon Vino Mini Jet Wine Filter
The first step after we’ve chosen our pads is to clean the machine. Sanitize it and put the pads in, and get it ready to go. As with all winemaking procedures, cleanliness is next to perfect. So we’re going to clean and sanitize our equipment before we use it. You need to disinfect it with a solution of potassium metabisulfite. Your standard solution is 50 grams or three tablespoons of metabisulfite powder in 4 liters or 1 gallon of water. You can mix that up and store it tightly sealed for a couple of months for your use. My favorite trick is to take that solution and put it into a trigger spray bottle. This lets you apply it to complex surfaces into things like a Buon Vino mini-jet wine filter motor that you really can’t dunk in a bucket full of sulfide solution. So you are going to go ahead and spray everything down with sulfite, including the plates, the hoses the connectors. Everything that’s going to come in contact with the wine. After you’ve sprayed down the plates and the machine’s interior, make sure to get the hoses that lead to and from the motor; you’ll need to rinse that off quickly under the sink. The next step is to spray all of the hoses inside and out and then rinse them off. Finally, rinse off the plates and reinsert them into the machine.
Prepare the Machine
The plates can only go in one direction. Make sure that the holes in the plates line up with the input and the output of the Buon Vino mini-jet wine filter machine. Before the pads go into the machine, we need to dunk them in water. This will wet them and allow them to swell up slightly. So they’ll seal tightly inside the plate and frame apparatus. Put them into a clean, sanitized bucket with some cool water or in a clean, sanitized sink. Just hold them under for a moment until they stop fizzing and bubbling. Pads go in with the coarse side, the dimpled rough side facing towards the front of the machine where the motor is located. This is important. Filter pads only work in one direction. Once the pads are all inside, line them up with the plates and make sure that the pads are sticking out on all sides. This will ensure you don’t get any leakage when tightening the plates down. Alternating between the two knobs is important. If you tighten it down all on one side, the plate and frame can get unbalanced, and you’ll have leaks. Tighten them firmly but only hand tight.
Tight with Your Hand
Never use a tool, or you could break that handle off. So tight with your hand, but don’t go crazy about it. Once the machine is fully reassembled, reattach the input hose from the motor to the plate and frame and then attach all of the other hoses. You’re almost ready to go.
The next step is crucial to the key to success and filtering. The filter pads have been wetted to swell them in the plaits and frame, but we need to condition them just a little tiny bit more. The pads are made out of cellulose, and cellulose is just like cardboard fiber. So they’ve got a bit of dust on them from rubbing together inside the box. We’re going to filter a gallon of water that will rinse the pads’ dust and set them up.
Start with the Filtering
Practically this is all that you need to do before filtering. You can now start filtering the wine.
It will look great, and that only took a couple of minutes of our time. The final step breaks the Buon Vino mini-jet wine filter down. Clean it safely. Discard the pads because if you leave them lying around in the garbage, you’ll have fruit flies right away. Clean the rest of your equipment, and you’re done.