Plastic bottle for secondary?

[dmf38]

Is it ok to use the plastic Bubbler bottles from NB, or the Better Bottles for long-term conditioning? Such as a several months conditioning of a Wee Heavy ale, or cider? Or do glass carboys work better for this?

 

[kaconga]

I like glass for anything longer than 2 months but will gladly use a better bottle for under that. I rarely bulk age beer for more than a month, mead on the other hand....

 

[RM-MN]

When you move your beer to secondary you lose most of the CO2 that keeps infections at bay. Your beer will have a little CO2 dissolved that will take the place of what is lost but it is minimal so if you do secondary, you need to do it into a container such that there is almost no surface exposed. That's why it is suggested you rack from a 6.5 gallon or larger fermenter into a 5 gallon carboy and fill it up to the neck.

If you look up the thread on infections you will see that they all or nearly all have a large surface exposed. That leaves the surface exposed to air and the oxygen loving bacteria get a chance to start there. Even with super sanitation you cannot keep out the bacteria floating in the air.

 

[dmf38]

I wanted to use 5 gallon plastic bottles for the secondary, so there wouldn't be much headspace. I want to make some Wee Heavy, and Belgians, and some cider. So the secondary phase might be 6 months or longer. I just wondered if the plastic would give it a bad taste. After reading the horror stories of glass carboys I'd rather not use those if plastic would work well.

 

[Calder]

Glass is always better. However, the plastic carboys today (including the BMB) are pretty good at keeping out O2. In plastic these days, you really don't need to worry about O2 permeation.

One thing I always do when transferring to secondary, is add a few ozs of simple sugar. Boil in a few ozs of water, let cool (although not really necessary), and add to the beer in secondary. It will create CO2, and scrub any O2. It's not that different than when you add priming sugar for bottling.

We always worry about this and that when we do anything to our beer. This just takes one of those worries away.

 

[dmf38]

Thanks for the sugar tip, I'll try that. And thanks for your responses everyone.

 

[bernardsmith]

wine makers can age their wines for years and I know of none who argue that the plastic used by BB allows in too much O2 through the walls of the carboy. There is some micro-oxygenation but that may not be a problem. The only thing we do is make sure that the wine fills the carboy right up into the mouth so that you have about an inch or so of headroom between the surface of the liquor and the bottom of the bung. But that headroom is about 1 cubic inch, at most.

We don't measure the volume of the liquor by the volume of the carboy. In other words if 5 gallons of liquor reaches the shoulder of a carboy then that ain't 5 gallons for our purposes. a nominal five gallons would be right up into the mouth of the carboy even if that means that 5 gallons needs to be closer to 6 gallons. Ditto 6 gallons (being closer to 7)

 

[Crysta Waston]

According to me, drinking water from pet bottles is safe. Currently, I am using 6.5 gallon water jug and I always recommend this to others.