lost bung!

any advice on getting a bung out of the inside of my glass carbow????

If you have a replacement bung I'd leave it in there until you rack to secondary or bottle it, you risk contamination trying to fish it out. It shouldn't hurt anything.

this happens to a lot of people, and I think the most popular solution is to use a wire coat-hanger to hook it and drag it out.

A hammer of most any size would do the trick nicely. I would probably lean more towards a longer handled one. Be sure to wear safety glasses !


I thank the Beer Gods this has never happened to me. If it does, I'll smash the carboy and never tell a single one of you!

I only used rubber stoppers on my carboys a few times before I got my carboy caps. Walker-san turned me on to them, and I've never looked back. You'll never have one end up on the inside either and siphoning is a cinch.

Brewsmith said:

I only used rubber stoppers on my carboys a few times before I got my carboy caps. Walker-san turned me on to them, and I've never looked back. You'll never have one end up on the inside either and siphoning is a cinch.

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In all seriousness, I think I could get my carboy caps jammed through the mouth of the carboy before I could get my stoppers through there!

Maybe I just buy my stoppers large, but there is NO WAY one of them could be pushed through.

-walker

thanks I'll try the coat hanger.

Walker-san said:

In all seriousness, I think I could get my carboy caps jammed through the mouth of the carboy before I could get my stoppers through there!

Maybe I just buy my stoppers large, but there is NO WAY one of them could be pushed through.

-walker

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Yeah, walker, I've never done it, but I will say that in the pile of equipment that I inherited, there are three differently-sized bungs. One is small (0.75" dia, perhaps), for the small hole in my plastic bucket lid. The other two are bigger (maybe 1.5" dia, and 2"dia). Also, I've found that the opening on my carboys is different as well (I have 7 glass and 2 plastic buckets). Not sure why all of this is like that, but you probably have same size as my largest bung. The one that is just a little smaller does a good job of stopping up all of my carboys, but I've been really careful, because unlike the bigger ones, when you press hard on it, it goes so far in that the top of it is flush with the top of the neck. Another few pushes and I can see how it would end up inside. Which is why I'm ever-so-careful.

As for the carboy caps, they're fine as long as they work. Because of the different rim sizes on my carboys, certain caps don't work on certain carboys, even though they all look like the same size caps. Once, I mistook that misfitting for a lack of airlock activity, which sucked. Oddly enough, it's the 5 gallon carboys that seem to have bigger rims than the 6.5 gallon ones, so I try to only use the caps on the 5-gallon ones.

My two five gallon and my six gallon carboys have a larger opening, barely, than my 6.5 (which the HBS says is really 6.8) gallon carboy. Still, all of my bungs are large enough that I don't think I could possibly get one inside any of them.

I guess there must be a variety of carboy mouth opening sizes and certainly there are different size bungs. Bungs are cheap, carboys are not, so probably best to get a selection of bung sizes.

After this experience, I now use the universal stoppers that have a ridge at the top to prevent you from pushing them through.