No More Glass Beer Fermenters - Lustreking Brewing

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No More Glass!
Home > Articles > No More Glass!

I am not buying any more glass carboys!

Glass carboys have been the standard fermenter of homebrewers and wine makers for years. They're popular for several reasons:

They do not allow for any permeability of oxygen.
They are easy to clean.
They are easy to sanitize.
They are what everyone has been using.

While the first three are valid points, I think the fourth needs to change. Why? Because glass carboys are dangerous. Glass is breakable, and the quality of the manufacture of glass carboys is not very good. If you've ever broken a carboy, you will have noticed that some parts of the glass are very thin, and some parts are very thick. A small bump or a quick change in temperature could cause them to shatter. If this happens, the least of your worries would be lost beer. I've heard of people that have been sent to the hospital with severed tendons in their hands. I broke two carboys in one month, and I was very lucky. I wasn't injured, and I didn't lose any beer. I did have to clean up two messes though. Glass carboys are also heavy, and even heavier when full. If you have one of the carboy handles, do not, I repeat, do NOT use them to carry full carboys. Use them only to carry empty ones! Find some old milk crates to carry your carboys. They have handles, and support the carboy from the bottom.

What is the alternative? One word: "plastics." There's a great future in plastics.

There's a famous (infamous?) homebrewer that uses nothing but plastic buckets. They are nice for several reasons. They are inexpensive, lightweight, stackable, do not shatter, have a nice wide opening, and are translucent to protect from exposure to light. They are made of a type of plastic that has fairly high oxygen permeability, so they are probably not suited for extended aging, but for most ales they should be fine. I personally think that the lid is hard to take off, and I like to be able to watch the fermentation. I do have a couple of the 7.9 gallon buckets that I use for primaries when I expect big krausen.

I personally like Better Bottles. They cost about the same as glass carboys and are shaped the same. They are made of PET plastic which has very low oxygen permeability. They are lightweight, and unbreakable. They also have a bunch of cool(very expensive) accessories, but I use the regular, non-ported ones. Two drawbacks that I've come across are that they don't have a 6.5 gallon size, and they won't work with my venturi pump system.

Some people are afraid of the Better Bottles because they are worried that using a carboy brush in them will scratch them. I have never had to use a carboy brush in a Better Bottle. The krausen and other gunk does not seem to stick to the Better Bottle as well as it does to glass. After a soak with PBW they always come out perfectly clean with no scrubbing.

Think about it. Will you think about it?

Here's a collection of carboy breakage horror stories that I collected over a lunch break from the major forums. Some food for thought!