Your thoughts on these for fermenting one-gallon experimental batches? Food-grade. With the lid…
The description says they are made for dry food. I have some similar ones for storing flour and sugar. The lids on mine do not seal well enough to use for fermentation. If you don’t care about a little gas leakage than they might be OK.
Sold by the dozen, seems like a lot of money for something that has no heat resistance whatsoever. (My experience with similar ones). For the unit price I guess you just throw it away and grab another one.
You’d be a lot farther ahead with one of these. I have 2 of the old style with the screw on lids, now discontinued unfortunately. I also have two of the large ones which have beer in them right now. I really like these things. Much nicer than regular carboys.
A one gallon fermenter is great for Mead or Cider because they have very little/no krausen. …but I prefer at least 1.5 gal for beer due to the headspace requirement. Unless you’re good with blowoff and packaging less than one gallon.
One day, you’ll wake up and there won’t be anymore time to do the things you’ve always wanted to do. Don’t wait. Do it now.
When I did 1 gallon batches I bought spring water in 3 gallon jugs from Home Depot. I used the water for brewing and used the jug to ferment in. Then I thoroughly cleaned the jug and exchanged it for a new one for the next batch. I got the idea from this video… https://youtu.be/2hJ11XetbUc
Lack of airtight seal may be an issue.
You’ll need to brew less than one gallon in those to account for headspace. Even with fermcap you’re going to get some krausen spilling out. If you’re using these as secondary vessels, it would be ok to add one gallon of beer as long as you aren’t adding any kind of adjunct that causes a secondary fermentation.
If you mean to use these for one gallon primary vessels, you would be better off finding something in the 1.5-2 gallon range. Even my 4l wine jugs are pushing out blowoff with fermcap.
I have looked at the seven-gallon Big Mouth fermenters. People say the fermentation pressure pushes the lid up and out. I don’t have a Big Mouth, but my solution to the lid problem would be to drill a two-inch hole in a piece of 3/4" plywood that’s about six inches wide by fifteen inches long. The hole is for the airlock, and the length is to allow two half-gallon jugs of water to be set in place, the eight pounds to keep the lid seated. Simple. Cheap. Doesn’t cost the fifteen or so bucks for the seller wants for the carrying harness…
The one I linked was the 1.4 gallon so no need for any carrying harness on that. I do agree, if you’re looking at the Brew hauler, I remember I bought mine for like $5 each when they first came out. Maybe less. Shortly after, they went off the rails with their pricing. I don’t think it was Northern Brewer, but I don’t recall. I just know they went from very affordable to insane, overnight.
I’m not sure I would care if it blows the lid off. When a beer is working that much, I don’t think you could contaminate it if you tried. Lots of breweries do open fermenters and it’s not a big deal. Bigfoot ale comes to mind. Lindemans Framboise, Lambic is another. Years ago I did an RIS that exploded one of the 6.8 gallon LD Carlson buckets, and it was the best RIS I ever made. You just never know. LOL
I think it’s the Australians who ferment their homebrewed beer in open-top ceramic crocks. I’ve read the directions on the cans and it reads to cover the crock with a “tea towel.” I have no idea what that is. The LBK from mr. beer is not air-tight; it has small half-rounds in the thread under the cap for letting the pressure get out. The conical from brewdemon has a 3/4" plug that allows the pressure to get out. The twelve-gallon feed bucket I bought has a lid that closes-up pretty well, but it’s not air-tight. It is, however, tight enough to keep rats and mice away from the livestock feed therein. I have drilled the lid for a one-inch stopper with which to use an airlock. I used a 26mm spade bit and the fit with the transfer valve is pure perfection. I don’t know much about homebrewing, but am I not exponentially-wrong to believe that the layer of carbon dioxide gas on the beer will protect it from infection to some degree?
The CO2 blanket is a myth, but we’re opening a different discussion there.
Lids that lack an airtight seal really aren’t too much of a problem for airborn contamination unless you ferment in an area with a lot of dust, like where you might have a grain mill, a garage or workshed, etc. Your more likely contamination vector is small insects like ants or fruit flies with those kinds of lids. Depending on how long you leave your beers in those vessels, you can slow oxidize your beers. If you’re moving beers out fairly quickly into kegs/bottles, maybe not an issue. If you’re letting it sit for a month, may be an issue. Basically, if you ferment in an area relatively free from dust and bugs and rack out as soon as the beer is good to go, this is not all that much of an issue.
When I was a kid we always called kitchen towels tea towels. I think it’s a British thing.
I always figured it was the outgassing that offered the protection, but I don’t know that for sure. I imagine the foam has something to do with it. In my case of my only ever open fermentation, as soon as I cleaned up the basement and the ungodly mess caused by the bucket blowing the lid off, I put the lid back on. It had plenty of extra headspace because a good bit of the batch was all over my floor. The house smelled wonderful. I don’t know that I would let the lid off for any significant amount of time. My point was simply that I don’t think it’s a big deal if a beer is working so much as to push one of those Lids up and off. They’re only held in by some rubber rings on the lid. Silicone, whatever. My most recent White House Porter came out the airlock and was all over the inside of my stand-up freezer which I use as a fermentation control chamber. I must have scooped foam off the top of those 30 times that day before it finally cooled down enough to slow down the yeast. At first I was trying to be real careful and sanitary but after a while it was getting old so I just started scooping my hands in and throwing the stuff in a bucket. Those were screw on Lids so they weren’t going to blow off but, I opened them enough that day you may as well have called it and open fermentation. The beer turned out fine and I never had any doubt it would. That was back in March so if it was going to be contaminated it should have been there by now.
FYI Adventures in Homebrewing has the Little Bigmouth Bubbler and with spigot for $16. I just got 4 for experimenting.
My ideal sequence of events is eighteen to twenty days’ fermentation, then into the bottles ASAP after that. Thirty days to condition. Thirty-five would be nice, and forty-two even nicer. I noticed that the final bottles consumed from my last batch were “better” than were the first ones. Thirty days is tough-- you get to counting-down the minutes as Day Thirty approaches. Another twelve days ought to be described as psychological torture, even though the reward could be some dam-ned good beer…
I think it started in Britain, but it’s gained currency in design/decorating circles in the US.
I saw a five-gallon “beverage dispenser” at Walmart for fifteen bucks; comes with a 3/4" snap-tap valve that’s sufficiently above the bottom to keep trub out of your bottling bucket. Punted bottom. Manufactured by American Made Plastics 945 Church St. Riverside, CA 92507. The barcode is 7 60981 03096 9. BPA-free…
I mean, it’s not fundamentally different from a Fermonster 6-gallon.
That, to about 98.6% accuracy. I like that the transfer valve is well-above the bottom-- keeps the dead yeast out of your bottling bucket. I would say that it’s essentially the same thing as is the six-gallon Fermonster. The beauty is that you can drive right down to your nearest Walmart and buy one in-person, thus beating somebody out of $15 to ship it to you. Its transparency allows you to watch your beer ferment and to see how the clearing is doing as the days and days go by. You can’t see the clearing transpiring in a white plastic bucket. I just put up the post about the beverage dispenser in case somebody might have wanted to do a batch of three or four gallons, and to watch the clearing process as the beer progressed toward Bottling Day.