Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/732978
62 WINES&VINES October 2016 OAK BARRELS Contact us today! 575 ird St. Bldg. A Napa CA 94559 707-255-6372 | napafermentation@aol.com www.napafermentation.com LOTUS: Breakthrough Pump Over Technology Lotus gently and uniformly distributes juice over the cap in tanks of any size without excessive bruising or misting. Lotus is compact, continuously adjustable, has few moving parts and is easy to install and clean. Three sizes available. Prices start at $650 The next generation of pump over technology is here. industry but takes a little more skill with a forklift. This section's analysis uses the same size assumption for barrels: 38 inches by 58 inches, head length by bilge width, when placed on a two-barrel rack. Forklifting racks with the barrel bilge facing the aisle is slightly more difficult. I recommend that the two-barrel racks be of a double-bar construction to provide the most strength to the rack. Insertion of the forks into the barrel rack becomes a little trickier as we target get- ting the forks in between the double bars. You can lay your forks completely flat to the floor and approach the rack so the forks pick up the rack from the bottom. In our case, we can receive a mixed rack where one barrel is empty and the other is full. If the empty barrel is not marked clearly, then the rack will want to shift to the full barrel, and having the forks in between the double bar can occasionally save us from dropping the rack in that case. Because the forklift is grabbing the load by the widest portion of the barrels, the forks need to insert until the barrels touch the load back- rest of the forklift. You should confirm, before changing from head facing to bilge facing, that your forks have adequate length to support the barrel racks. You can see the layout graphically repre- sented in the illustration on page 63. The main difference as compared with heads fac- ing the forklift aisle is that some of the ladder space has been eliminated. This gives a 10% capacity advantage in the same space using the same stacking height. If you stack only as high as needed to utilize your space, the ca- pacity increase may allow your cellar to re- duce how high you stack your barrels for a more seismically stable layout. There are additional advantages to this Barrels are placed on two-barrel racks with their heads facing the aisle. 100 ft 50 ft Forklift aisle 14 ft x 100 ft = 1,400 sq ft 28% of total space 10 stacks - 14 rows 6 high = 1,680 barrels 5 high = 1,400 barrels 4 high = 1,120 barrels 14 ladder aisles at 24-inch space = 1,008 sq ft 1 ladder aisle at 52-inch space = 164 sq ft 1,172 sq ft total = 23% total space 1 ft away from wall