Thanks for all the advice. My situation is doing 10 gal and its getting to be a royal pain slinging around 2 full carboys from the brewdeck back into the barn where my ferment fridges are. Worse I brew in a climate with 80F water supply pretty much year round and use a ice bath fed CFC into the carboys and use them as a settle tank then rack off the break after it settles, so I have to sling them into the fridge after chilling, back out to rack off, back in to ferment, back out to rack to keg. I usually have 2-3 batches in various ferment stages so I’d have to get 3 conicals to keep up. I ferment with temp ramping so a conical would have to be self-cooled or build a dedicated fermentation closet but that comes with a dedicated ferment temp. I harvest yeast since I live way back in the woods and its hard here to get fresh except from yeastman. So a cooled conical would reduce the work load by dumping cold break, then collecting yeast, but the expense is crazy money. Thinking I just need to man up and keep hauling carboys.
Get rid of the glass carboys! They suck! Go with plastic buckets or the Speidel tanks of Better Bottles. I’ve completely given up on dangerous glass carboys. Too many serious disasters with those things.
No joke, I got stitches after a couple of broken carboys. I use buckets and BBs now and wouldn’t go back for anything.
And the Speidel fermenters have carrying handles. That makes moving full fermenters much easier.
I am also a Speidel fan. I can confirm using the spigot to harvest yeast is clog city. I collect the slurry via auto siphon into a 2L bottle. The process is not great. I have to get my son to hold the tube in the bottle and keep the bottle from falling over. But, it works.
As a fermenter and cold crash vessel the Speidel is great.
My spigot doesn’t leak. I use the spigot to transfer and it works pretty good. Some slurry gets in the keg but not much. One dumb mistake I have made more than once: if you have the air tight cap on for cold crash and then use the spigot to transfer you need to remember to open that cap. Otherwise, there will be back pressure and you won’t get good flow. It will flow though and when you realize your mistake it’s too late, air bubbles will get sucked back into the fermenter through the hose going to the keg. The air bubbles stir up the yeast cake pretty bad. Also, don’t turn off the spigot too soon. It is hard to get flow started again if your down to the last 0.25 gallon.
Regarding lots of parts, I don’t have a problem there. I find it very easy to clean.
I do 10 gallon batches in my two 60 liter Spiedels, using the supplied valve - never a leak so far after dozens of batches…my only issue is lifting them out of my lager chest freezer - I need a hand from a friend with that. I have the makings of a winch set up (using a deer hanging arrangement), but I never seem to get around to putting it together…too much brewing to do.
2 ten gallon batches would be a back destroyer.
Do not hurt yourself.
I usually do 10-12 gallon batches and use the 15 gallon Curtec containers with the screw on red lids. The lids have a seal and are tight enough to do tranfers. Best fermenter I’ve found. The hands fold away, but lifting them into the freezer does s#ck. I would never go back to the small necked fermenters. I still have glass carboys for extended secondary. I would like to have a 25 gallon conical, but these fermenters work so well. They do remind me of the larger Spiedel.