Beer Forum

Do most people use glass or plastic carboys? It seems like my plastic carboy, even though I scrub/clean it with bleach with a thorough rinse..still keeps some of the smell of the old wort..especially the alcohol type fumes. I also let it soak overnight with some sodium bicarbonate, but still has a residual smell to it. This is why I was considering glass...

Also in the summer time when the heat is up around 100 and my house is 75, what is the easiest way to keep the carboy around 68-72? I was considering blowing a fan on it 24/7. I'm brewing American style pale ale.

I mostly use glass carboys because I have a bunch of them and most of them were free. If you are getting residual wort smell in your plastic carboys, then you aren't getting them completely clean. Bleach is primarily for sanitizing and is not a cleaner per se. Give those carboys a good soak with hot water and PBW or oxyclean. This will remove those residual sugars and proteins that are causing the smell. I am don't like the idea of using bleach as a sanitizer because to get the taste and smell of bleach out, you need to rinse it. If you rinse, you defeat the purpose of sanitizing.

For keeping the temperature down, especially in the summer, put the fermenter in a plastic tub with enough water to about 3/4 of the level of the wort. Drape the fermenter with a towel or t-shirt that dangles into the water so that as the water evaporates from the towel or shirt more water will be wicked from the tub. The evaporation will lower the temperature of the fermenter several degrees. You can increase the cooling even more by freezing a bunch of partially filled water bottles and keeping some of them in the tub with the water, rotating them out and replacing them when they thaw. When I was using the tub method, I used a small fan to blow on the towel to increase the evaporation rate.

Wayne

I switched to Better Bottles a few years back.

I just fill them for a few days to a week with PBW and have never had any problems.

I will never use bleach again other than for washing clothes or pouring down my garage drain, after brewing. I ruined my 2nd batch of beer after using bleach to sanitize the keg. I rinsed the keg out more than 5 times and still picked up a bleach smell in the beer. With PBW and Starsan there is absolutely no reason to use bleach.

+1 on the better bottles. I soak mine in PBW until I get around to cleaning it and no smell. I even had a dead mouse in one once, soaked in PBW...no more dead mouse smell. You better believe i filled it with sanitizer after and let it soak for about 20 minutes though.

I just feel like glass is a lifelong investment, or close to it. The better bottles are great, but I feel like at some point, I would be sketched out about the sanitation. For instance if you got an infection in there once, are you going to feel confident using it the next time? I like to play with bugs so I feel like if I can go at that carboy with oxiclen, then bleach and a scrub brush, then sanitizer, it has to be clean. If you go with better bottles I think the ones without spigots are safer: less moving parts to clean.

Glass can be dangerous though. I've run into a couple of homebrewers with terrible scars from broken 'boys.

TheDarkSide wrote:I even had a dead mouse in one once, soaked in PBW...no more dead mouse smell.

Aww, man. You could have brewed the official rat pad brew.... Now improved with 100% more rat in it!


Mylo

Mylo wrote:

TheDarkSide wrote:I even had a dead mouse in one once, soaked in PBW...no more dead mouse smell.

Aww, man. You could have brewed the official rat pad brew.... Now improved with 100% more rat in it!


Mylo

Yeah but I wasn't sure when to put it in...at 15 minutes, knockout, or dry rat with it.

I am a firm advocate of better bottles. A hot PBW soak overnight cleans mine 95% of the time. If there's a serious amount of dried kraeusen, I sometimes need a second soak to get the stubborn stuff off. Now that these are generally cheaper than glass, it's an even easier choice.

I got fancy and bought some of the ported closures, too. Fits an (admittedly somewhat narrow) blowoff tube snugly, and once the vigorous fermentation subsides, I use their dry-lock.