I would like to replace my current plastic sampling thief. Has anyone used the glass ones? Comments?
A glass wine thief in my hands will last as long as an ice cream cone on a dashboard in July.
They sure do look nice.
I like the thought of glass for cleanliness. I don’t like the thought of breakinging glass inside of a carboy full of beer.
Which plastic thief do you have? I really like this one…Fermtech Wine Thief
You may already know this, but if you shake it up and down you get all the beer you need in the thief.
yeah i prefer the plastic or stainless. dropped them many times and would have been a mess if glass.
I’m curious. Does that thief leak from the bottom when you lift it out of the beer? I used to use the base of my auto siphon as a thief. Extracting the beer is very easy but I got tired of the leaks in my ferm chamber.
Maybe a few drips.
+1 if its leaking significantly that stopper may be obstructed or defective.
Yeah, a couple drips. The pressure of the beer seats the valve pretty quickly, but there are always a couple of drips from beer dripping off of the outside.
Are we still talking about a wine thief? 
I have this plastic one. It does tend to leak a bit. One problem with the leaking is that if it happens to get on my carboy haulers (which is a little harder to clean by just wiping up), mold can form due to the optimum conditions in the fermentation chamber.
So aside from the breakage factor, Is the glass thief any more “dripless” than the plastic thief?
What about using a refractometer?
I use a refractometer for preboil and post boil readings, but I prefer a hydrometer for FG readings. Alcohol present in beer makes refractometer FG readings inaccurate unless you use a correction.
I try to place the hydrometer into the test jar right over the mouth of the fermenter. I’m using a Spiedel so it’s a wide mouth.
i always thought the glass wine thief was made for barrels. i am sure they make different ones but i know that the curved ones will not fit into a carboy well. personally i use the northernbrewer 3 piece one for the past 6 years and dig it.
I do have a refractometer and I have the same concerns. Is this concern justified? Beersmith has a correction tool. is this tool accurate? Has anyone here done a side by side comparison?
This one’s great, and it’s local.
The above references Sean Terrill tool seems to work. I think the thing that you have to get used to when using a refractometer rather than a hydrometer is that you might not get a totally accurate reading even with correction. but it will be perfectly precise and repeatable and in my book that’s at least as important. Do I care if my Barley wine is 11% ABV or 11.8%? not really. What I’m most concerned about is that the final gravity has been reached and the beer is stable.
+1
Exactly. I use beersmith to predict my FG, but I don’t really care if it finishes 1.011 or 1.013. What I do care about is that it’s fully attenuated. The refract calc allows me to do that while ballparking the FG number to ensure there wasn’t an attenuation issue. And I don’t need to steal a bunch of my beer in order to get those readings!