Anyone done this before? I'm talking like 3+ months in a plastic bucket. If so, did you experience any oxygenation as a result. I transferred a Belgian blonde into one (using Brett hence the reason for secondary), because I had run out of glass fermenters. I also added French oak cubes because I'm going for a pseudo barrel-aged character. Which makes me wonder, what would the difference be in oxygenation from extended aging in a barrel vs a plastic bucket?
The proper term here is oxidation. For the vast majority of beer styles oxidation is an undesired effect: hop fade for hoppy beers, the formation of compounds that are associated with a beer going stale, etc. Do you want oxidation compounds to be formed for this batch of beer? Cheers!
Yea oxidation/oxygenation... But yea I wouldn't mind some barrel-aged, 'oxidized' character. If it were an IPA id be worried, but with an oaked blonde ale I think a little oxidation character could be welcomed. Just wanted to see if anyone's noticed it with a long secondary in plastic. The other half of the batch is secondarying in glass so it'll be interesting to compare the flavors.
Hopefully you will get some input here. I have only used plastic buckets for primary fermentation. I make it a practice to not keep the beer in the buckets too long with mitigating oxygen ingress being one of the reasons for not keeping the beer in the bucket too long. Cheers!
Update: if gravity hasn't moved at all in the course of a month (currently at 1.006) then I'm going to go ahead and bottle it. Will just shoot for 2.6 vol CO2 to be safe with the brett and all. So, 1 month total in a plastic bucket.
