Glass marbles (cat eye, green glass) safe to use?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Sago

Well-Known Member
Joined
Nov 2, 2013
Messages
69
Reaction score
0
Are these safe to use? I have a bunch already in my wine and thinking of buying a lot more but I stepped in a thread where they could contain lead or other chemicals\toxins. Paranoid now, anyone experience any problems with normal dollar store glass marbles like these below?

100_2270.jpg
 
Sorry I can't answer your question, but I was curious. What is the purpose of the marbles?
 
I use marbles to sink the hop bags for dry hopping all of the time. Works great...
 
MarbleKing.com has plain safe glass marbles, the ones you are using were probably made by the same people who put melamine in pet food and in their own baby formula. The plain glass ones are cheap and you wont have to worry about any lead leaching out which is what caused the fall of the Roman empire!!!! WVMJ
 
WVMJ said:
MarbleKing.com has plain safe glass marbles, the ones you are using were probably made by the same people who put melamine in pet food and in their own baby formula. The plain glass ones are cheap and you wont have to worry about any lead leaching out which is what caused the fall of the Roman empire!!!! WVMJ

My thoughts exactly. Those dollar store marbles were probably made in a lead factory.
 
I live in Canada so thats a problem for me, I contacted them anyway
 
Don't use anything made in China. In fact boycott China. Nothing good comes from there.

Rant building....
 
Didn't think about the lead/heavy metals that china is famous for. Seeing as how glass and lead have such a history of being buddies, I'm not sure I wanna use the 2 bags of green flattened marbles I got from the dollar store. Maybe I should get a fish and test them out for awhile lol
 
How much volume you looking to displace? It's a lot easier to top off with more wine than to try to increase the size of a fixed volume, the topping wine you get back and in a 21L batch (I'm assuming you're using a kit) one or two bottles is not going to make a difference on taste
 
I buy pails of juice for $27\20L if I were to buy bottles of wine it'll improve it xD

A little under the neck is fine? If a bottle just does it.

Also, if I were to add sorbate the fermentation is complete and its not too dry. Do I still age in the carboy?

I got an email from The Lead Education and Abatement Design (LEAD) Group Inc

Code:
if you've been drinking your wine then a blood lead test will be very informative. Similarly for anyone else who has been drinking your wine. The more results the merrier. Please send all results with ages and genders of each person tested, and some rough idea of which person has drunk the most and the least of your wine and how they line up in between in order. If there's a trend - if the people who have imbibed the most of your wine have the higher blood lead levels, then you could easily justify testing the wine for lead, and finally testing the marbles for lead. This would need to be done at a lab although you may be lucky and find someone in a nearby environmental consultancy or health department has an XRF machine that you do a heavy metals screening test on the marbles. Heavy metals are the only class of toxic contaminants that are relatively easy to screen for and test at a lab. You'd have to ask the marble manufacturer whether the marbles contain any other toxics - there are too many toxics options with too many expensive test procedures (or no test available at all) to test for the 80,000 toxic chemicals that are known to be used today.

But your question about lead is a good one - because lead makes numerous pigments (with a wonderful array of colours from yellow to orange to red and therefore including green, purple, and brown), is known as an ingredient in glass-making, and is cheap so is typically used in unregulated countries whenever a more expensive ingredient would be used in a more regulated country.

If the marbles come up with no lead in the screening XRF then it tells you there's no lead in the surface or the surface coating (if they are indeed coated). XRF testing doesn't tell you whether there is lead in the main body of the marble, for that, the marble would need to be acid-digested for analysis at a lab. It is because lead is leached out of glass (and other substrates) by acid and by alcohol that it is particularly unwise to put any leaded thing in contact with wine. That's why lead foils were phased out on the outside (over the cork) of wine bottles, and that's why people should be advised never to store wine in lead crystal or ceramic, and never to squash their grapes in a (possibly leaded) ceramic bathtub. A case occurred in Australia where for several years, a bathtub winemaker went with worsening health problems to dozens of doctors before one of them tested his blood lead level (it was extremely high). That's why I go straight to the blood lead testing as my first recommendation.

I hope this helps and I'd love to get all and any test results, as would the health department, and probably winemakers organisations / bloggers / twitters etc - in case a warning needs to be sent out to others who
 
I buy pails of juice for $27\20L if I were to buy bottles of wine it'll improve it xD

A little under the neck is fine? If a bottle just does it.

Also, if I were to add sorbate the fermentation is complete and its not too dry. Do I still age in the carboy?

I got an email from The Lead Education and Abatement Design (LEAD) Group Inc

Code:
if you've been drinking your wine then a blood lead test will be very informative. Similarly for anyone else who has been drinking your wine. The more results the merrier. Please send all results with ages and genders of each person tested, and some rough idea of which person has drunk the most and the least of your wine and how they line up in between in order. If there's a trend - if the people who have imbibed the most of your wine have the higher blood lead levels, then you could easily justify testing the wine for lead, and finally testing the marbles for lead. This would need to be done at a lab although you may be lucky and find someone in a nearby environmental consultancy or health department has an XRF machine that you do a heavy metals screening test on the marbles. Heavy metals are the only class of toxic contaminants that are relatively easy to screen for and test at a lab. You'd have to ask the marble manufacturer whether the marbles contain any other toxics - there are too many toxics options with too many expensive test procedures (or no test available at all) to test for the 80,000 toxic chemicals that are known to be used today.

But your question about lead is a good one - because lead makes numerous pigments (with a wonderful array of colours from yellow to orange to red and therefore including green, purple, and brown), is known as an ingredient in glass-making, and is cheap so is typically used in unregulated countries whenever a more expensive ingredient would be used in a more regulated country.

If the marbles come up with no lead in the screening XRF then it tells you there's no lead in the surface or the surface coating (if they are indeed coated). XRF testing doesn't tell you whether there is lead in the main body of the marble, for that, the marble would need to be acid-digested for analysis at a lab. It is because lead is leached out of glass (and other substrates) by acid and by alcohol that it is particularly unwise to put any leaded thing in contact with wine. That's why lead foils were phased out on the outside (over the cork) of wine bottles, and that's why people should be advised never to store wine in lead crystal or ceramic, and never to squash their grapes in a (possibly leaded) ceramic bathtub. A case occurred in Australia where for several years, a bathtub winemaker went with worsening health problems to dozens of doctors before one of them tested his blood lead level (it was extremely high). That's why I go straight to the blood lead testing as my first recommendation.

I hope this helps and I'd love to get all and any test results, as would the health department, and probably winemakers organisations / bloggers / twitters etc - in case a warning needs to be sent out to others who

a little under the neck is fine.
as to sorbate, i never add sorbate to my wines - i let them get to full dryness and age them until clear (for whites) or barrel age (for reds)...
so perhaps the first question might be, what are you aging in the carboy for? to clarify? to finish fermentation?
you would use sorbate if you were back-sweetening the wine, so that yeast does not wake up with the introduction of new sugars and carbonate your wine in the bottle and/or increase its ABV or explode bottles or...
some prefer to get the properly sulfited wine under the protection of a wine bottle as soon as possible, this is true for white wines especially... a carboy bung is not very airtight compared to a submerged cork (wine on the cork in storage)
red wines are a different story... they can take time to settle out and most don't like to use finings on red wines. beyond settling/clearing, im not sure there's much benefit to aging reds in carboys eithers - barrels are strongly preferred. a carboy is just a big wine bottle with a rubber stopper.

note the above are not "facts", just my subjective opinion on the subject. don't flame me if you believe carboy aging works faster than bottle aging or any other theories... its all about what YOU like.
 
I've yet to find out what I like or not lol. Fermentation is still going on, its in its secondary. Making red wine atm, how long do you think the yeast stops working before I bottle? I too don't want to use sorbate.
 
Use a hydrometer or a refractometer with an alcohol conversion chart to find out final brix/gravity... Did you start with grapes, must, juice or concentrate? If grapes you'll need to crush, then take the wine off gross lees shortly thereafter by racking to a new carboy or container. For reds (unless it's a kit) you'll want to decide if the wine style you are going for would benefit from ML malolactic fermentation... Common for many reds.

The you can test your SO2 levels and adjust, check final Ph and adjust, check final acidity and adjust and then bulk age until the wine has had a chance to naturally clear... This can take some time, months even... This allow slows co2 dissolved in the wine from the fermentation to naturally escape/de-gas.

You would use oak at this time if the wine called for it.

Then monitor the wine and oak level until it's reached what you desire, when it does you can remove oak and/or rack again.

Then, continue bulk aging until it's dropped all sediment.

Could be months for this to happen.

When the wine is clean/clear of suspended solids you can bottle. You
Will want to check SO2 levels again before you bottle and probably every few months of bulk aging as a precaution.

It can be a lot of work between the long waiting periods and usually more chemistry than what you'd have in making beer.

This is for making wines that can stand up to $25+ commercial examples. Wine kits are more straightforward and generally provide fining agents and so2 additions to make the process less complicated and a bit faster.

Kit red wines might be ready to drink ideally after 12 months post fermentation, and should sit at least two months in bottle to get over bottle shock. Red from must or grapes can benefit from multiple years of aging, in both barrel and bottle.

That's the short answer. Haha.
 
Back
Top