I hadn’t broken a carboy in 9 years and now I’ve broken 2 in the last 2 months. There was no significant injury, but in the second case my pyrex had fallen from the edge of the freezerdor and cracked the side of a carboy full of precious IPA. The break was very clean and didn’t appear to generate small shards. I had just put gelatin in the carboy. I was able to pour the beer into another carboy in a sanitary manner.
Do you think the beer is safe? My thought is that any glass particles, if present, will fall to the bottom and become encapsulated in the gelatin. I am going to bottle that portion and will be racking it to a bottling vessel prior. It would take terrible luck to get any glass particles through 2 transfers with the final being a bottling wand.
Do yourself a favor and move away from glass. I was very stubborn about not giving up my carboys - heck, I had 8 of them at one time. But a few months ago I got some better bottles and started using them and not only are they much lighter and easier to move than carboys, they come clean easier too. I won’t say I’ll never use a carboy again but for most of my homebrew batches I use the better bottles.
Striking glass will sometimes result in a Hertzian cone breaking out on the inside. Even so, with the heavy weight of glass and the fact that you’re fining anyway, I’d salvage it myself. If there is no cone that is even better.
+1 to Better Bottles. The only thing I really use glass carboys for now, is degassing wine with a vacuum pump.
Thanks for the advice gentlemen. I am going to take it in full. I was just thinking last night that I need to either move to buckets or better bottles. The better bottles seem the way to go with the recent purchase of carboy caps, stainless racking cane and adapters to c02 connection.
+1 - you can’t beat purgeable/pressurizable stainless for long term storage. You can beat the hell out of glass. In fact, I don’t recommend glass for long term storage. Unless maybe it’s a capped bottle.
I had a carboy full of brett hefewiezen(think Jolly Pumpkin Bam Wheat) that was almost ready to drink. Normally it would have been in a keg but it was Oktoberfest and all my kegs were full. My son was pulling krugs off the shelf and one fell, bounced off a sack of malt and hit the carboy under the shelf on the other side of the room. While we watched a big crack slowly developed, then the whole side of the carboy gave way spilling 5 gallons of beer onto the garage floor. Since then I only use glass for sour beer or vinegar, everything else goes in a keg.
If you don’t have kegs, and you can fill close to the neck of the carboy, glass is good for long time storage. That said, I dunno about now, but back when I was buying kegs you could get them for $10 a pop. Carboys were $40. I had way more kegs than carboys.
I would not toss the beer. He said the carboy cracked, not broke, so there may not be any shards. If there happen to be shards of glass they would all be on the bottom. It’s already in another vessel, so that lessens the chance of shards. Nut siphon the beer out with your siphon tube an inch off the bottom and you should be safe. Glass shards won’t float.
Thanks again for all the advice! I decided to keg the beer. I siphoned carefully, leaving 1.5 inches of beer above the trub with the plastic part affixed to the end of the racking cane. That plastic piece fits on incredibly snug and I feel any particles of glass small enough to pass through this area will be trivial. We bottled the other 5 gallons in a seperate carboy which was not affected. I shook the keg to force carbonate and the beer is wonderful. My friend and I, both of us vividly aware of the details of the situation both enjoyed two pints. No glass was noticed. Just in case some particles should find themselves in the keg I’ll waste a pint down the drain a week from now after it is totally settled.
It’s funny. The owner of the homebrew shop in town agreed there was “nothing to worry about” and that “fragments big enough would be on the very bottom.” He said, “People eat glass all the time” and we both had a laugh. Then I bought a brew pale for Mead Day tomorrow. I’ll be getting some Better Bottles next month to replace my broken fermentors.
Just to clarify, the carboy did break in one spot, but the fragments fell outward and they were large. It left a hole perhaps 2 inches in diameter. When I poured the beer into another fermentor I didn’t see any debrie and there were no small shards.
