I'd like to brew in a small 1.3 gallon plastic bottle

I am wondering if this is a good idea...but I'd like to experiment and brew beer that I could ferment in a small (1.3 gallon) mineral water bottle.

Is this a good idea just to find the right recipe and not waste a lot of time/ingredients to create 5-gallon experimental batches?

My main concern is how to create an airlock for the bottle neck.

Search for the 1 gallon brewers thread. Lots of people do it. I personally stick to 3 gallon batches for experiments, but to each his own.

For the airlock, you could either get a rubber stopper that fits your bottle, rig a blowoff tube, or just use a rubber band and sanitized foil.

One of my local suppliers even sells one gallon kits, and has scaled recipes and all. Been thinking about setting up and doing it myself for some of the more extreme experiments.

I just use a gallon bucket. Most brew shops have them

http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/...rmenting-buckets/2-gallon-fermenter-base.html

sure it will work! Just make sure you do something to deal with a blow-off since you won't have much headspace to play around with.

I brewed a gallon in a gallon plastic apple juice jug just to see if I could. It's been bottling for a week and a half so I'll let you know next week how it went.

I probably blew it with an airlock. I thought I'd put the lid on it and "burp" it once or twice a day but it simply swelled up to sphere much too fast. So I put a piece of saran wrap held with rubber bands which pouffed up and held. And then the carbonation died off.

I've since read that a better idea would have been simply take a rubber balloon and poke a little hole in it with a pin and place that over the mouth. *That* would have been ingenious and elegant.

Another thing I see often in my friends winery is filling a ziplock sanwich baggie with sand or salt and lay it centered over the opening. Although it is not a replacement for doing things right, it works really well when you have no other options.

Just wrap the top with a sanitized piece of aluminum foil. Far superior to all those methods in terms of sanitation and simplicity.

BlackGoat said:

Just wrap the top with a sanitized piece of aluminum foil. Far superior to all those methods in terms of sanitation and simplicity.

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But wont the CO2 push it off? By the way...I'd like to do closed-fermentation...but I am not sure a piece of aluminium foil will do that.

blaster_54738 said:

I just use a gallon bucket. Most brew shops have them

http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/...rmenting-buckets/2-gallon-fermenter-base.html

Click to expand...

To expensive. Go to HD or Lowes and get a 2 gallon paint bucket. easier to clean than that bottle. YOu can drill a hole for the air lock just like the holes in the 5 gal. bucket covers.

Elysium said:

But wont the CO2 push it off? By the way...I'd like to do closed-fermentation...but I am not sure a piece of aluminium foil will do that.

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No it won't push the foil off unless there is a blow-off. There are enough tiny gaps that the CO2 will escape. Most of us who make starters just wrap the top of our starter in foil. Its quick, simple, and effective.

Don't forget the ole jailhouse pruno standby of poking pin holes in a balloon and stretching it over the neck of the bottle. This has acted as a successful "airlock" for me, as long as you're not gonna let it sit for some crazy amount of time like months and months and months.

It all depends on how active your fermentation is. Personally, I've only had a few that were like whoa-nellie, so I would probably just go for it (1-gallon batch in 1.3-gallon bottle, probably cover it with foil during the active phase, just in case, then balloon that sucker for the remainder)

In fact, many one-gallon brewers have followed the thread title instructions and have united here.