Owly055
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- Feb 28, 2014
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Would someone please explain to me why people use carbys and better bottles? I personally can't imagine using either due to the cleaning issues. Brew buckets, or in my case a Walmart Ice Tea jug and a Brew Demon, both 3 gallon capacity work great, and are fairly easy to clean. I own 2 brew buckets, two smaller fermenters, a number of jugs with spigots, two carboys, a bottle filler that I don't use, barley crusher, brew bag, stock pot, several fermentation locks, etc.
The carboys get used for secondary on kombucha. When I have to clean them, I use Muriatic acid and a pressure washer. I can only imagine the mess a dried krausen would make. What is the attraction? I'd bottle in wide mouth bottles if it was practical!!
I'm a newbie so please excuse my ignorance. I started all grain brewing in February. I've brewed 22 batches of all grain beer since that time. I'm having a ball experimenting with hops and various malts and adjuncts. I've only followed a recipe twice in that time.
Prior to that I hadn't brewed beer since the late 60's when all you could get was malt syrup or "hop flavored malt syrup". Try finding malted grain, or hops in those days. And I was living in Portland, Or. at that time. Head of household could brew 200 gallons of wine per year for home consumption, brewing beer at home was illegal!! We speculated about sprouting grains and roasting them to make our own malt.......... It was laborious to even research something like that back then. The nearest computer was in Seattle, and took up 3 floors at the University of Washington!! I know......... I paid $20 per minute of processor time to use it!!!!
Things have changed....... We have good beer, not the crap that was called "beer" in those days. There were a few red ales available, and Heidleburg made an Alt that was pretty decent, and Bilitz (Later known as Henry's) made a Bavarian Dark that was great compared to everything else on the market.
I was under age, needless to say. I turned 21 in 1976, but by that time I'd run through the alcohol thing. I'd been brewing beer and wine since the age of 14, and turned legal here in Montana at 18 (1973). Coors was special.... because you couldn't get it in Oregon, Washington, or Montana, and I made thousands of dollars trafficing in Coors as a result. My own beers were pathetic, but I had nothing decent to work with! Light and dark extract, hop flavored or not. I did use some wild hops & garden hops when I had the chance, but there was no way to judge what the result would be. It was wine and moonshine for me. I built my first still at 16! But I didn't know about heads and tails, but we learned that the first stuff was bad, as was the last stuff.
At 17, I would take my dad's car to the Beer distributor with a list, and pick up between 10 and 20 cases of beer.... $2.80 per case for "premium" beers. $5.00 in the store, but the store wouldn't sell to me. I paid by check, arrogantly throwing my driver's license out for them as they required a driver's license to accept a check. They must have thought my dad owned a bar. In fact he was a tea totaler and a preacher who would have been horrified had he known. But how many kids write checks to pay for 20 cases of beer at a time? Chutzpa, my Jewish friends called it. But I was very very careful about who drank my beer, and how much, where, and what they did...... I as a hard ass, and as a result nobody ever got busted.
Ah........the good old days. Were they? Truth be told they weren't. We had Vietnam staring us in the face. They were good because we were young, bold, and immortal. Many of those people are long gone. I went to a class reunion (40) last summer, and didn't meet a single classmate I knew......not one!! I did meet several faculty I remembered and who remembered me (not surprisingly).
.......... Oops. I find myself rambling. Not uncommon at all. Sorry.
H.W.
The carboys get used for secondary on kombucha. When I have to clean them, I use Muriatic acid and a pressure washer. I can only imagine the mess a dried krausen would make. What is the attraction? I'd bottle in wide mouth bottles if it was practical!!
I'm a newbie so please excuse my ignorance. I started all grain brewing in February. I've brewed 22 batches of all grain beer since that time. I'm having a ball experimenting with hops and various malts and adjuncts. I've only followed a recipe twice in that time.
Prior to that I hadn't brewed beer since the late 60's when all you could get was malt syrup or "hop flavored malt syrup". Try finding malted grain, or hops in those days. And I was living in Portland, Or. at that time. Head of household could brew 200 gallons of wine per year for home consumption, brewing beer at home was illegal!! We speculated about sprouting grains and roasting them to make our own malt.......... It was laborious to even research something like that back then. The nearest computer was in Seattle, and took up 3 floors at the University of Washington!! I know......... I paid $20 per minute of processor time to use it!!!!
Things have changed....... We have good beer, not the crap that was called "beer" in those days. There were a few red ales available, and Heidleburg made an Alt that was pretty decent, and Bilitz (Later known as Henry's) made a Bavarian Dark that was great compared to everything else on the market.
I was under age, needless to say. I turned 21 in 1976, but by that time I'd run through the alcohol thing. I'd been brewing beer and wine since the age of 14, and turned legal here in Montana at 18 (1973). Coors was special.... because you couldn't get it in Oregon, Washington, or Montana, and I made thousands of dollars trafficing in Coors as a result. My own beers were pathetic, but I had nothing decent to work with! Light and dark extract, hop flavored or not. I did use some wild hops & garden hops when I had the chance, but there was no way to judge what the result would be. It was wine and moonshine for me. I built my first still at 16! But I didn't know about heads and tails, but we learned that the first stuff was bad, as was the last stuff.
At 17, I would take my dad's car to the Beer distributor with a list, and pick up between 10 and 20 cases of beer.... $2.80 per case for "premium" beers. $5.00 in the store, but the store wouldn't sell to me. I paid by check, arrogantly throwing my driver's license out for them as they required a driver's license to accept a check. They must have thought my dad owned a bar. In fact he was a tea totaler and a preacher who would have been horrified had he known. But how many kids write checks to pay for 20 cases of beer at a time? Chutzpa, my Jewish friends called it. But I was very very careful about who drank my beer, and how much, where, and what they did...... I as a hard ass, and as a result nobody ever got busted.
Ah........the good old days. Were they? Truth be told they weren't. We had Vietnam staring us in the face. They were good because we were young, bold, and immortal. Many of those people are long gone. I went to a class reunion (40) last summer, and didn't meet a single classmate I knew......not one!! I did meet several faculty I remembered and who remembered me (not surprisingly).
.......... Oops. I find myself rambling. Not uncommon at all. Sorry.
H.W.
