It is a new carboy for fermenting my beer in. That is actually the name of it. “Better Bottle”. Really. That is the name of the company.
It’s pretty good marketing, don’t you think?. Picture this…. Someone goes into the beer store and the proprietor says, “What do you want?” and the customer says, “I want a better bottle”, and wham bam a sale is made. I need to start a company with a product called “Lunch”.
The Better Bottle is actually a carboy made entirely of plastic. I has been designed for fermenting wine and beer, so it won’t spoil the brew. If you try this trick using a regular plastic water carboy, the beer will be spoiled because that plastic is permeable by air, and the oxygen in the air will ruin the beer. The Better Bottle was designed so that the air cannot get in. It also has no BPA in it, which the water bottles apparently have.
And…. it isn’t glass.
But….. why a plastic bottle after all these years? Well the glass carboy I have used for 50 batches weighs 60 pounds when it is full of beer. This new plastic carboy weighs 45 pounds when it is full. The bottle itself only weighs about an ounce. Here I am lifting the empty bottle with my pinky.
OK. Sure. I have strong pinkies from playing my banjos, but still…..
“Big deal”, you say, “So what?… can’t you lift 60 pounds?”
Sure, I can lift 60 pounds. But lifting 60 pounds with my arms straight out, while placing the glass carboy onto the quartz counter….. ever so gently to avoid breakage…. was becoming difficult.
Quartz is three times harder than granite. Glass is not.
I bumped the counter last time, and my heart stopped beating for a second. “Heart stopped beating” is not a good thing at my age.
OK here’s the math. A gallon is 231 cubic inches. So, five gallons is 1,155 cubic inches. If you spread 1,155 cubic inches of sticky goo onto the floor 1/8″ thick….. um…. using my fingers…. that would be 9,240 square inches of goo on the floor… which is a space that is approximately….. wait a second… taking a square root….. 96.1249187256 inches on each side… dividing by 12 inches per foot…. 8.0104098938 feet on each side…. of sticky sugar water…. in my kitchen. That pretty much covers the whole kitchen.
Cleaning up 5 gallons of sticky beer wort and glass shards from my kitchen floor does not sound like a pleasant afternoon, especially after the trip to the Emergency Room for the stitches. So I have switched to plastic.
Here is the plastic bottle with the water in it, sitting happily, stress-free on the quartz counter top…. no worries about breakage.
The garter is to help lift the bottle and move it. The black tape stuck to the sides measures gallons in the bottle. I put the black tape on the bottle as I filled it the first time so I can just fill to the level I want and not worry about measuring. Pretty classy, huh?
So today I retired my glass carboy, and I have started batch number 51 in plastic. I am making a dark Honey Porter again, so I have two types of specialty grains, English 2-row Crystal and Chocolate malt.
There are three bags because I put no more than 1/2 pound of grains in a bag, and there is a pound of crystal in there and a half pound of chocolate malt (don’t make me go through the math).
Same process as last time. Steep the grains; boil the malt, honey and hops; cool the wort; sparge into the carboy; pitch the yeast; yada yada…. blah blah blah… and ta-daaaaa
Another batch is ready to bubble us to sleep at night.