Why am I bothering to sanitize my primary fermenter ?

[chonn]

I use stainless steel primary fermenters and I always carefully wash them and then sanitize with star-san.

....and then we immediately dump in earwigs and leaves and spiders and cobweb and ants and probably at least one feather.....

(don't get me wrong--we harvest carefully and get clean clusters but there's always a few leaves that show up when we start punching the cap down)

So why am I bothering to carefully sanitize the primary vessel??

I guess if I was doing a pre-fermentation soak ? Or fermenting with natural yeast ? But I am pitching commercial yeast AS I CRUSH and fermentation is rocking and rolling in an hour or two and I don't see what could be on the (newly clean) walls of the fermenter that is nearly as bad as what is on even a single large cluster of grapes....

If I pitch immediately can't I just clean the primaries with soap and water?

 

[Rice_Guy]

... If I pitch immediately can't I just clean the primaries with soap and water?

On a numbers basis canned food has been treated to kill nine log cycles of organisms. (1000000000) it is commercially sterile. ,, ie you can eat it and nothing ever would make you sick.
Cold water washing removes five log cycles of bacterial contamination. Adding hot does six. Hot and soap can get up to seven. ie you are pretty close to sterile / nothing is left alive.

As an industry person, you are wasting effort trying to sterilize a primary.
My view of wine is that there are natural fences that keep infection from growing. ex pH below 4.0 eliminates food poisoning organisms. pH below 3.5 (which country wines use as a rule) prevents most infections (but not Acetobacter / vinegar). Reading journals wild lactic bacteria will normally be about 100,000 on the crop you are harvesting. This is where your risk is.
,,, I would spend more effort checking sugar and pH and headspace.

 

[ovjock]

I like your thinking on this. I have asked myself the same question. I have heard of people finding a pack of cigarettes in the grapes (probably from a migrant worker).