Hi Folks,
Decided it was time to put down a TFFV to make some neutral for oaking and gin production through the stay at home time. Opened up the bran bucket and found that the contents were riddled with weevils. Now I know that some of you will be saying “just toss the lot in. She’ll be right mate.” Nah... I just couldn’t do it. It all went to the worm farm and a couple of packs of bran were picked up from Woolies. This got me thinking. The original bran was purchased from a produce store and obviously contained weevil eggs. If I could stop the weevils hatching there would be no problem. Don’t like chemicals at all but one thing hit me. What about carbon dioxide? Got plenty of that on hand every ferment, so an experiment is now under way. I have attached some tubing to the fermenter airlock, directed that into a small jar to catch moisture and then redirected tubing into the top of my bran bucket.
The lid of the bucket was left unsealed to allow air to escape and the airlock was still bubbling away nicely. This meant that there was very little back pressure to stop gas transfer. I plan to put some water absorbing crystals into the bottom of the jar to make sure that the carbon dioxide is quite dry when it passes into the bucket. Hopefully the CO2 will do the job on the weevils and stop the eggs from hatching. It’ll be an interesting test to see if it works. If the CO2 slowly filters down to the bottom of the bucket, I am guessing that there will be some chance of success. If it all works out, the cracked corn will get the same treatment.