Home Brewing Kits Homebrewing Beer With Glass Or Plastic Carboy

Home Brewing Kits

You would like to brew your own beer, but you have no idea what kind of equipment you need to use. Whether to use a glass or plastic container to ferment your home brew is the biggest decision any home brewer has to make. Each has their strengths and disadvantages, which we'll now discuss.

Home Brewing Kits

Lots of people start out brewing and fermenting their homebrew with plastic food quality containers. These brew pails, manufactured by such firms as True Brew, are very affordable and easy to use, however they are very limiting. The plastic isn't transparent so to monitor your fermentation you must remove the cover of the pail, which increases the risk of contaminating your batch of home brew. Additionally, the insides of these brewing buckets are easily scratched which can produce a convenient place for bacteria to hide and spoil your microbrew.

Home Brewing Kits

Glass carboys were the next generation of homebrew fermentation vessels. Brewing with glass gives you the advantage of being able to view the beer fermenting because glass is clear. Glass isn't oxygen permeable, so you don't have to worry about any contamination via the glass carboy, and it's easy to monitor the beer through the glass. So long as you don't accidentally break a glass carboy it generally lasts forever, and the glass is not very easily scratched. One of the drawbacks of using glass carboys is that they're heavy. A standard 5 gallon batch of homebrew weighs close to 40 lbs, and with the standard glass carboy weighing close to 20 pounds, you have to haul around quite a lot of weight when it's full. The most significant danger in using glass carboys is that they can break if you bump into anything. Glass does not like severe temperature change, so pouring very warm or cold beer into a glass carboy can cause it to break or shatter. In order to remove home brew you will need to siphon it out.

Better Bottle makes plastic carboys that are fairly new on the homebrewing market. Built from food grade plastic these are very light in weight. Better Bottle plastic carboys are offered with a spigot at the bottom for easy transporting of beer without needing to use a siphon. You can't crack a plastic carboy by dropping it and it won't shatter if filled with scorching or cold liquid. The clear plastic allows for viewing your homebrew, but can be damaged and wear over time requiring replacement. How permeable the plastic is to gas is not really known, so if you have a very strong homebrewed beer that you would like to age you won't want to use a plastic carboy. The plastic carboy may also leak if you don't seal the spigot correctly.

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.

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