Carboy up!

Lucky me, for fathers day my wife got me $80 in gift certificates to my local home brew store - www.goodbrewer.com.  So I decided to buckle to the home brewers pressure/"snobbery" and invest in a 6.5g glass carboy for my fermenter to replace  my bucket fermenter, cause you know 50% of the home brewers claim you need to be in glass carboys for the best brewing.  I only bought the fermenter, so I'm still racking to a bucket.  Why, you might ask?  Simple I felt I'd replace one to try it out, while using the balance on my gift certificate to purchase ingredients for a new recipe.


For my first foray into using my carboy I went with a classic blonde ale, since it's summer and all.  Thus-far, the experience has been interesting.  Getting the wort into the carboy from my kettle was easy enough, even without a kettle valve which I've been meaning to add; just used a nice big funnel and a strainer - no problems.

Then it came time to rack....   Now this was a bit of a challenge.  I knew the basic principal - use the racking cane and siphon off the liquid; however, I had the damnedest time getting the liquid to flow.  I tried using the "water" method, i.e. pre-fill your tubing with sanitized water to start the siphon - no luck.  I tried to suck it up, something they taught us in class, even though you really shouldn't do that given the potential of introducing bacteria and contaminating the beer.  I repeated both processes at different elevations of the fermenter with respect to the secondary - still no luck.  In the end, what got me was that my tubing did not form a tight enough seal with my racking cane, so I had to improvise and use some rubber bands to tighten the seal.  Once the seal was air tight, I was able to get the siphon going.  Lesson learned, I'm buying a simple "rubber" clamp that will "squeeze" tighten the tubing seal.  I'm probably also going to get an auto-siphon to make the start process easier.

Finally, the clean-up process.  Given the narrow opening of the carboy, it makes perfect sense that you'd want to clean this right away and not let it sit, otherwise scrubbing would be a pain.  So, after completing the racking I whipped out ye old carboy brush, filled 'er up with water and cleaning solution - then went to town.  It was actually quite simple, fill with water, dump in cleaning solution, shake/swirl/roll, scrub, empty and rinse.  Unfortunately for me, I don't have a carboy dryer, so I'm not exactly certain how I'm going to keep it upside down for proper drainage/drying.  I guess that's another "purchase" or inventive thing to create.

Now that I've used both the buckets and the carboy, if only as a fermenter, I could make a comparison; however I'm going to hold off until I've made at least one more in the carboy and have tasted the current one....

7/24 - Update:
So my blonde ale is done and I have to say it turned out great.  Was it the carboy?  I don't think so, in the end I am using my carboy, but I feel like buckets are still a little better - just easier to deal with in terms of transfer, cleanup, etc...  And let's face it, their cheaper, so you could have double the fermenter's/secondaries going at once for literally half the cost if you were doing carboys.