Hot answers tagged plastic
7
Maggie is right, if you are using a food grade plastic it should be fine.
I do have to say that what you are doing with the boiling water essentially an unnecessary step and may be actually increasing your chances of infection, not decreasing them. Hear me out.
Boiling water doesn't stay boiling very long once off the heat. You can't heat the bucket ...
7
Before I got kegs, I used to bottle with 1.5 liter PET soda bottles (the standard size in Norway.) The beer tasted fine, even after several months, and no hint of soda.
I used to soak them for 24-48 hours to remove the labels, then clean thoroughly with PBW or OxiClean. Then sanitize with StarSan.
After this, there is no odor from the bottles and, as far ...
5
Abridged answer: primary them for 6 weeks, and if your gravity is where you want it, then rack to one of your PET bottles and age. Simply, you could have some off-flavors as a result of yeast autolysis. For higher-gravity beers, you want to let the yeast do their work, but if there is going to be 9 or higher ABV once fermentation is completed, that is a ...
5
Fermenting in a the free 5 gallon bottles you can get will work fine - after all that's pretty much what Better Bottle PET Carboys are. Compared to the 2-2.5 gallons of headspace you get in a bucket fermentor, the 1 gallon that you're leaving isn't much, especially for a high gravity beer like a RIS, so be sure to use a blowoff tube rather than an airlock.
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4
Secondary for a Hefe seems silly to me. Leave it in primary for 5 more days is a better idea. Then rack right to bottling bucket for bottling day.
Actually 5 days in secondary for any beer is a waste of time really. Any benefit isn't worth the extra cleaning of equipment and risk of exposure to oxygen or airborne contaminants.
3
I'd give the the PET a chance with just a few. Maybe even add a little extra sugar to a couple of those to see if they can take more pressure than normal just as a back up assurance should you end up with a contaminated batch at some point.
If you are willing to risk a batch I'd say the same thing for the jerry can. But its a big volume once you open it ...
3
Check out shipping on those tanks. I looked into placing an order of five of their 35-gallon tanks and it would cost $450 to freight them to me.
Don't forget (or "have you heard") about Mini-Brew plastic conicals. They're a little more expensive, but you get a racking port and a side port for temperature probe. I found mine on eBay for about half the ...
2
6 months later and having used both king keg and corny keg there is one major point to add:
Force carbonation
with a corny keg comes the additional expense of a CO2 regulator but with this comes the capability to accurately control the pressure of CO2 on your beer and get the level of carbonation you want (something I struggled with previously).
It was ...
2
If vinyl isn’t the gold standard for homebrewer’s tubing, I don’t know what is. It’s good to ~170° F max.
As Tobias mentioned, silicon tubing is used for higher temp transfers.
Purchase anything anywhere “Food Grade” and you’re good-to-go for low-temp homebrew, but I wouldn’t get too creative with random hardware store DIY bric-a-brac without the “Food ...
2
I wouldn't risk carbonating in the JerryCan. I've seen Gatorade bottles explode under pressure and it's not fun. I would stay away from anything that's not made to handle the pressure. I would even be hesitant to use the linked PET bottles unless they say somewhere that they're rated for pressure.
In my early days I would use 2-liter soda bottles when I ...
1
The Worst that could happen is you ruin the batch (undrinkable) and end up with stained containers that give a strange flavor to things you use them with.
That's probably unlikely. If you use the plastic bucket for 4-6 months with the mead, you may end up leaching some of the plastic chemicals into the mead, giving it a plasticy taste. If you're set on ...
1
Yes, they're fine to reuse, if:
Threads are good
Inner seal is good
Just make sure to rinse them asap, sanitize them before use, and inspect and toss any worn out ones regularly.
The safety seals don't matter, but you may want to consider replacing the caps if you're transporting the beer--there's the chance an officer could claim that the broken seal ...
1
Off flavors come from process issues and sanitation issues. An example of a process issue would be over-pitching or under-pitching yeast, or over oxygenating or splashing while transferring and oxidizing finished beer. Sanitation issues are off flavors from microbial infection.
I would say that most of the time off flavors are generated through process ...
1
I can't comment on Palmer's observations, I haven't had a plastics-related infection.
Generally, from a scratch standpoint glass is better than plastic, when it comes to using carboys as fermenters. But only from that standpoint. Plastic carboys are superior in a lot of ways, but hard to clean because you can't just go at them with a bottle brush.
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1
I think it comes down mostly to materials. You don't want to store your beer in a plastic "keg" for any length of time. Stainless steel is a better option because its easier to clean, it can get banged around, and it lasts longer. The rest just comes down to size issues and what suits your needs. You can get 3 gallon kegs up to full on half barrels (15.5 ...
1
Those would be perfect, one of the biggest home brew shops in the UK sells a range of plastic conical fermenters like these. As stated the risk would be in getting a scratch and thus an infection. But if you are careful with it you should get 2-3 years out of it. For $55 I think its a no-brainer.
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