Plastic Carboys Versus Glass Carboys In Home Brewing Beer

You would like to brew your own beer, but you have no idea what type of equipment you need to use. One of the biggest decisions any homebrewer needs to make is whether to use a glass or plastic carboy to ferment their homebrew. Each has their advantages and weaknesses, which we’ll now discuss.

A lot of people start out brewing and fermenting their homebrew with plastic food quality buckets. True Brew is an example of a brewing supply company that produces such buckets that while are easy to use, are quite limiting. You have to remove the lid from these pails in order to check your fermentation because the plastic is not clear. This increases the odds you’ll ruin your home brewed beer. Bacteria also likes to hide in the soft plastic walls of these buckets which can easily become scraped and become dirty.

After plastic buckets homebrewers started using glass carboys. Brewing with glass gives you the advantage of being able to view the beer fermenting because glass is clear. Glass is not oxygen permeable, so you don’t have to worry about any contamination through the glass carboy, and it’s easy to monitor the beer through the glass. Glass carboys do not get scratched and will basically last forever as long as you don’t break them. One of the drawbacks of using glass carboys is that they’re heavy. A 5 or six gallon carboy weighs close to 20 lbs, and if you add 40 lbs of homebrew to the container, you’re now up to 60 lbs that you’ll have to haul around, which is pretty heavy. Of course, unintentionally bumping into a sink or wall with a glass carboy can result in it shattering and dumping the beer everywhere. Glass doesn’t like extreme temperature change, so pouring very hot or cold beer into a glass carboy can cause it to break or shatter. You must also use a siphon to remove homebrew from a glass carboy.

Plastic carboys such as Better Bottle are fairly new to the home brewing world. Made from food grade plastic these are very lightweight. They are available with a spigot near the bottom which means it’s easy to move your microbrew out of the Better Bottle without any danger of ruining your beer. Plastic means there’s no chance of shattering the carboy by dropping it or filling with hot liquid. The plastic can become scratched, but it’s also transparent and allows you to view the beer during fermentation. If you brew a very strong home brew beer, you’ll want to condition and ferment it in a glass carboy simply because plastic is more gas permeable, which could cause the beer to taste terrible. Also if you don’t close off the spigot correctly you may have problems with leakage.

So should you brew with a glass or plastic carboy? Having brewed with both, I feel that brewing with plastic is much better than brewing with glass. I think plastic is much safer and much easier to handle, and transferring homebrewed beer is very easy with the built-in spigot. However, if I make a very strong home brew that needs to ferment or condition for more than a month, I always transfer the micro brew to a glass carboy. So in conclusion, it’s best to have both glass and plastic carboys to use for creating home brew in your own microbrewery.

Learn more about becoming a homebrewer. Stop by our instructional video website where you can learn how to brew your own beer. It’s easier than you think!

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