The Micro Winery on Kimball Using Tanks in a Micro Winery How much is in that tank?

With the conversion to tanks instead of using carboys has been an interesting progression.  Needless to say pumping wine and cleaning a tank is much easier than dealing with multiple carboys.   Gone are the racking days and carboy washing in December after  Malolactic Fermentation is complete.  I can report this season has been easier.  But like any endeavor one gets accustomed to certain things and some of them become second nature.  One of these is  making So2 Adjustments and other adjustments as are necessary. It is second nature using carboys.  The ones we use are 5 gallons and using them for so long you don’t even have to think about calculating anything.  It is all in your head.

Not so with tanks.  After pressing and filling the tanks and then racking off the lees into clean tanks the one thing you realize is you have no real idea how much wine is in the tank.  Truthfully I never even thought about it until I needed to add K meta.  Certain things you can approximate but rather be a bit more accurate especially when the tank is somewhere between 2/3s and 3/4s full.   Tanks do have a decal on the side the indicates liters but I was not comfortable with that either.

My solution is not ground breaking.  It is  quite simple yet very accurate.  All I needed to do was calculate the amount in gallons per the height and diameter of the tank.  Then all you do is measure the height of the cover and you have your results.  But that is a bit cumbersome so my solution is the know the total height of the tank and use a ruler measuring the level of the cover and subtracting that from the total.   Great!   But what about all this math.

One thing about the internet is the variety of calculators available for so many different uses.  Calculating volume in gallons is no different.  But that still would mean you would need to run the calculator every time  you needed to measure.  I did find this great site that not only calculates but allows you to create a chart in inches based on the tank height and diameter.  Once it was calculated the site allows you to print out a chart of gallons in inches for that tank.

So now in the winery are  4 charts for 4 different diameter tanks at the ready.   Problem solved nicely.