small batches

[mordantly]

im looking for input on 2 or 2.5 gallon vessels aside from carboys that can be used to ferment small batches.. i found a 2 gallon glass cookie jar at wally world that could work, but the lid is more akin to a bucket so it can work as a primary. are there wine jugs larger than 1 gallon in existence?

[alan_marks]

Check out US Plastics, www.usplastics.com . They have a wide variety of buckets and carboys in a number of sizes.

hth,
Alan

[spiderwrangler]

im looking for input on 2 or 2.5 gallon vessels aside from carboys that can be used to ferment small batches..

Is there a reason you are avoiding carboys and trying to use cookie jars? They do make 3 gal carboys...

[Ozwald]

They do make 3 gal carboys...

And they're awesome! My 5g's will be gone long before you can pry my 3g's away from me.

[dmtaylor]

Love the 3-gallon carboys. Just picked up another one. I generally make batches from 1.7 to 2.2 gallons, somewhere in there.

[mordantly]

yeah i know, i just don't like th eidea of $25 for a 3gal carboy!

[Ozwald]

I have 2, 3g carboys & they're the best thing since sliced bread. I am brewing on a 100L system (barely shy of a bbl) so they're mostly for yeast starters, but they fucking rock none the less. Mead test batches, small batches, 12g lager pitches, they're worth it.

Scaling a 1g to 12g isn't hard at all. Watch your specialty malts, scale them slightly less than your base malts. Each one behaves a different way, so there's no set formula but after you do it a few times you get the feel for it & can pretty much nail it on your first try with a little practice. Light crystals you don't want to adjust as much, for example, roast for flavor you dumb down a little more, roast for color you dumb down a bit less. Heavier crystal malts can be a bit more challenging. Personally I found that my first couple of tries I over thought it & was treating my recipes like calculus homework. After that it was a bit more intuitive.

Lock your percentages, adjust the volume, drop all your specialty percentages a couple points, bring base up to fix gravity & tweak away. You'll get it after a handful of attempts. Honestly I have a harder time accounting for differences in equipment than the recipe itself. A bigger MLT doesn't recirc like your smaller one. Your kettle utilization gets thrown off a bit from a 1 to 7 to 30 gallon boil. If you have 2 systems that you're comfortable with, in different sizes, it's an absolute breeze.