What material container is used for liquor storage?

The storage of wine requires containers. Do you know what kind of container is used to store wine? Let me explain it to you in detail.

Material container for wine storage

1 ceramic container

Pots, pots and altars are the most common, all made of clay. Generally, it is round, with a small belly and a big mouth, and it is glazed or glazed. It is the oldest artificial wine storage container in China, with the longest history and the most extensive application. In the past, almost all small clay pots and kettles were used in the process of flowing, used to transport and sell loose wine.

The advantage of ceramic container is that it can keep the quality of wine, and air can easily enter, thus promoting the aging of wine, and the cost is low. The longer wine is stored in ceramic containers, the more metals are dissolved, and the yellower the wine is. Therefore, the color of wine is related to the storage period. In the same era, the materials and quality of containers are different, and the coloring degree is also very different. In ceramic containers, whether ceramic containers or cement storage tanks with ceramic tiles, the dissolution of calcium is the largest, followed by magnesium, followed by copper and iron. According to research, these metal ions are dissolved in wine and play an important role in wine aging.

Pottery urn is a traditional storage container widely used in China's brewing industry, and it is an ideal choice for long-term production practice. Today, some famous wineries still use clay pots to store raw wine and finished wine, and attach great importance to the quality of clay pots.

2 blood material container

The traditional wine storage containers in China are wine sea, wine jar and wine basket made of Vitex negundo or bamboo stick, made of multi-layer mulberry paper and coated with blood material. There are also wine boxes made of wooden boards or cement pools, which are pasted with layers of mulberry paper and coated with blood as wine storage containers. Both of them are collectively called blood containers, which are traditional wine containers in China with a long history.

"Blood material" is a kind of plastic protein colloidal salt made from animal blood, mostly pig blood and lime, which forms a semi-permeable membrane with alcohol. This membrane is characterized by water permeability but alcohol permeability, and has a good seepage control effect on liquor with alcohol content above 30%. Liquor with alcohol content below 30% is easy to penetrate into blood paper, resulting in loss. If the storage time is too long, it will also make the blood paper layer soft and fall off. Therefore, it is not appropriate to store liquor in a blood container below 30 degrees.

The advantage of blood container is that it can take local materials, with low cost and is not easy to be damaged. Big wine baskets, wine seas and wine boxes can each hold more than 5 tons of wine. It is said that wine stored in blood containers will play a very good role in maintaining the quality of wine. After more than three years, although the alcohol content remained unchanged, the color of the wine tended to turn yellow.

3 wooden containers

Liquor brewing generally does not use pure wooden containers, and brandy and whisky are stored in oak barrels, which can achieve special effects.

4 other containers

With the development of wine production and the appearance of modern materials, many winemakers use large metal containers to solve the problem of small storage of ceramics and blood containers.

① Stainless steel container. Stainless steel has excellent stability and is not easy to be oxidized and corroded. At present, a large number of stainless steel containers are used in wineries to store liquor.

② Cement pool of wine storage pool. It is a large wine storage container for modern wine production, made of reinforced concrete and built underground, semi-underground or on the ground.

Advantages of storing wine in clay pots

Make the wine more delicious

Due to the special material structure of the pottery altar, a series of physical changes and chemical reactions such as volatilization, association, oxidation and reduction occurred in the storage process of the original wine, and the strong components in the wine were reduced through the changes such as volatilization, association, oxidation and esterification. At the same time, the aroma substances generated by the reaction make the wine soft, mellow and stable, and make the liquor more delicious.

Increase trace elements in wine

The intake of trace elements by brewing microorganisms is less, which makes trace elements rarely brought into wine during distillation. However, in the process of wine aging, ethanol volatilizes and the acidity increases, which accelerates the dissolution of trace elements from pottery jars into wine and makes wine contain many trace elements beneficial to human body.

The average content of dozens of elements in normal people is consistent with that in the crust. The average content of dozens of elements in human blood is consistent with that in seawater. These two correlations show that maintaining the balance of dozens of life elements is the most basic key factor for human health and longevity. Without minerals and trace elements, vitamins and enzymes can't play a role, and life is only disillusioned. Trace elements in liquor are beneficial to the aging of liquor and necessary for human body. The content of trace elements in liquor depends on the aging container, which is also an important reason why pottery jars are superior to other containers in storing liquor.

It is more conducive to wine aging.

The wine body accelerates natural aging in the pottery jar; Good air permeability and no leakage, ensuring that the wine will continue to age in the jar and become a "live" wine; It is opaque, slow in heat conduction, avoids the chemical reaction between light and wine, maintains the appropriate wine temperature, not only has the aging effect in the wine cellar, but also makes the wine more fragrant as it ages, with elegant, comfortable and wonderful "old wine taste" or "old wine taste"; It can automatically generate original oxygen and promote the oxidation and aging of beneficial substances in liquor; Moreover, the production process is exquisite and the collection value is extremely high, which can enhance the taste and cultural connotation of wine.

Compared with the safety of stainless steel containers, clay pots are far from safe. Even so, the famous wine companies are willing to take risks and take pains to choose pottery jars to store liquor, which is the charm of pottery jars.