Split Carboy

[teamrushpntball]

Finished my second batch of beer yesterday and everything went great. Chilled to 70*, moved my carboy to a water bath to get down to 64 and pitched my yeast. Let it go a day, nice active fermentation, crazy airlock.

At this point my temperature controller arrived and I was ready to move to my fermentation chamber to finish. As I went to get the carboy, I noticed a crack running the circumference of my carboy. I siphoned out the top 5 or so gallons to a keg and left the remaining gallon in the carboy.

At this point I was able to lift the top 3/4's of the carboy out of my water bath. Had split in two. There was some seepage of wort into the bath.

Disregarding the potential contamination from the water bath, how big of a risk am I taking by drinking this? I found no glass shards when I cleaned out the tote. It was the top 3/4th, bottom and one big triangle piece. If I'm careful when I transfer to a serving keg think that's good enough? What about straining through a wilser hopping bag or 300mesh metal screen?

TLDR: Glass carboy split, should I just pitch my beer or is it safe?

 

[day_trippr]

The odds that there is a glass fragment extant that could wind up in a glass are non-zero.
I'd rubber-band a piece of nylon mesh over the end of a racking cane when transferring to your keg just on GPs...

Cheers!

 

[Horseflesh]

If it were me, I would carefully filter just enough for me to taste and evaluate the brew... and dump the rest.

 

[brandonlovesbeer]

If it were me, I'd cut my losses and the $30 worth of ingredients and just throw it out.

 

[kh54s10]

Ingesting glass would not be a good thing. How much of a risk are you willing to take. You can filter it with a fine mesh bag or a beer filter.

Now get rid of glass carboys and get plastic or PET fermenters. I use Better Bottles. They are much lighter and you don't have much worry of severed arteries!!! Or drinking glass slivers....

 

[teamrushpntball]

Scrapping it, there goes 6oz of hops unfortunately. Yeah I have 3 kegs I need to rebuild that I found at a garage sale. Think I'll ferment in those for the time being.

Really disappointing, on the bright side I have a good idea on my efficiency and only have 1 thing I need to do differently for my third batch. Better than the 11 I had listed after the first, and this one is simple: no glass carboys.

 

[IslandLizard]

Scrapping?

As said before, filtering through a fine mesh hop sack (~300 microns) would keep any potential glass flints out of the beer. I would have NO problems with that.

Fermenting in 5 gallon kegs, hmm, why not plastic buckets, a Spiedel, or a Fermonster? They have headroom, a keg doesn't, unless you're OK with 4 gallons for all the work you do. Or split 6-8 gallons over 2 fermentation kegs, and bottle the remainder.

 

[teamrushpntball]

I think I've changed my mind and plan to keep it. When i transfer to the serving keg I have a 275 mesh stainless filter i will attach inline with the siphon. This coupled with my research​ showing powdered glass as non harmful has alleviated my fears.

As to fermenting in the kegs, that's just a stopgap measure as they were what i had on hand. Haven't decided on doing 9 ish gallon batches and splitting or getting an alternative fermentation vessel yet.