Glass carboy necessary?

So in following some threads and other blogs, there is a suggestion that better bottles will allow too much oxygen to permeate while souring.

Really?
I know that the glass is more air-tight, but using better bottles has worked fine for all my other beers...
Just hoping to save a few dollars. It's a choice between a glass carboy or some new per licks...

I use Better Bottles for my funky beers, they work great. Ive left a beer in a BB for 10 months on a Bugfarm 5 cake with no issues.

Oldsock (Mike T/Madfermentationist etc) uses the BB for his funky beers as well, once I saw he was advocating it I was pretty comfortable.

Thanks! That's what I was hoping to hear. I went looking through some of his blog (madferm) but couldn't find solid answer...

Actually better to have a BB, no oxygen permeation could mean a weak funky flavor! Some oxygen is good

Better bottles are great. I use them almost exclusively. The one worry when using them with anything funky is getting the bacteria in scratches then wondering why the lager you fermented in the same bottle is now a sour.

I listened to a podcast with Jamil, he claims to use ale pails for his Rodenbach clone. I got a wine barrel from a winemaker that he was throwing away so that's what I use. Plastic should be fine.

Every time I brew sours, I split the batch into 1-gallon glass containers and 3-gallon HDPE containers (I've got lots of them, they prevent my larger plastics getting contaminated, and store easily in the crawl space). In side-by side taste tests of the same beer in glass and HDPE, of up to a year, I have been unable to tell any obvious difference in the beers.

The HDPE containers are nothing special. No claims like Better Bottles as to their minimal O2 permeability.

I think you will do fine in any fermenter. Just make sure you have a decent seal on it.

Mike over at the Mad Fermentationist uses better bottles, so I couldn't imagine they would have negative effects.

I just started using them for sours, but only because I ran out of glass carboys.

I put my first brew into a BB almost two weeks ago. I guess I'll soon see how they compare. I don't like pails because you can't see the beer without opening them. I've used the same glass carboys for years, but am wanting to up my volume and BB seems a good way to go.

One difference, I would probably buy a used glass carboy, but wouldn't even consider a Better Bottle that wasn't new. But this is because of not knowing what was in them before. With glass there are no worries.

I don't know about the rest of the people here at homebrewtalk, but I am a huge fan of better bottles for all of my beers. I can imagine others on the board have also used them on funky beers for over a year too.:cross:

As others have said, I'm a big fan of Better Bottles for sour beer. Never had any excess acetic acid production, and I tend to be pretty sensitive to it. The risk of a glass carboy full of 18 month old sour beer breaking is too much for me (although I still have one that's been going for a few years).

My big issue with buckets isn't the permeability of the plastic, but the iffy-ness of the lids. Hard to be sure their seal is 100%. Similarly for any other fermentor, the biggest risk is not having a tight fitting airlock/bung. Or just as bad, an airlock that runs dry allowing the free-slow of air.