Plastic Buckets?

[Roana Aldinoch]

To my beer brewing friends, I have a question.

I've often heard of brewers using plastic buckets in the first fermentation, and thought nothing of it. Recently, a friend said that the plastic allows air to get into the brew so she would never use it. That seems counter to what I've heard others say, and to what I know of the properties of plastic.

Can someone please shed some light on this for me?

Thanks!
Roana

[Baden,Doug]

Well, I can say that plastic has no air problems. I use it all the time and have good results. Glass is too easy for this clumsy fighter type to break. You can usually seal glass better (think carboy and cork), but the shape and style of the plastic bucket is MUCH closer to the traditional brewing vessel, which is wooden or metal. Now wood leaks air something fierce, but it is the popular (read cheap) traditional material for this purpose.

Plastic does pick up stuff from the fermentation and impurities. If a batch goes bad in the bucket, toss it. The mold/fungus/whatever is in the plastic and will taint anything made in it from then on.

That being said why worry about the air? Well, if beer is done in larger quantities (and 5 gallons is not large) it gets a head on it which hardens into a cap, which keeps out the air at the proper time. Most of us do not make more than 5 gallons at a time, so we use a lid to simulate this. The problem is that the timing is kind of off, but we do with what we have...

I find that the mix of grains, the boiling process, and the hopping is much more influential than the small amount of air involved with a plastic bucket.

Arundel

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[Bob Wenzlaff]

At 07:24 AM 9/18/2009, you wrote:
>I've often heard of brewers using plastic buckets in the first
>fermentation, and thought nothing of it. Recently, a friend said
>that the plastic allows air to get into the brew so she would never
>use it. That seems counter to what I've heard others say, and to
>what I know of the properties of plastic.

To some degree all plastic is permeable to O2, _BUT_...

In general, the primary fermentation stage is too brief for any
significant oxidation to occur. You get far more O2 infused during
the siphon process to get the wort into/out of the primary than you
would through the walls of the primary. I've even seen commercial
brew-pubs add a polyethylene primary fermenter when they needed to
quickly extend their capacity.

Use of plastic soda bottles for final bottling may be the source of
this. They are much thinner than fermentation buckets, and the
product sits in them much longer.

You'd think the pressure of the CO2 would keep the O2 out, but
actually the infusion rate vs. partial pressure of different gas
species is almost independent.

Verba Movent - Exempla Trahunt
Words move people, Example compels them

Godfrey Thacker of Northumberland.