Wide mouth plastic carboy?

I've long term aged big stouts and sours in buckets and didn't regret it. The stouts were in the 4-6 month range. The sours were aged about a year. CO2 was infused into the headspace and the lid wasn't removed until I was ready to package it.

Glass or BB will do a better job at preventing O2 ingress. Would my beers have been better in glass or BB? Not sure. I have a BB and have long term aged with it and the results were not significantly better or worse that the bucket beers.

 

Well, here is the 'thing'. Some people will state that they have kept their beer in buckets for x weeks (where x may be 4 or some other number) and say something like "my beer had no oxidation problems". I too have kept my beer in my HDPE bucket for up to 5 weeks and never experienced any perceptible issues with respect to oxidation. Does that mean the maximum time you could (should) keep a beer in an HDPE bucket is 4 (or 5 or...) weeks? Let me help you, the answer is "no". I personally do not know the 'correct' answer for the value of x. If you at some point discover a technical paper which has date on this topic I would appreciate you providing a reference/link.

Cheers!

 

Feels pretty snug to me. I didn't understand the post that said it wasn't. I didn't understand the post that posited the Speidel as better. It is certainly as tight as a Bell jar, in fact that's a pretty good analogy for how it works.

 

At the point before it starts to taste bad.

 

I've also read that Big Mouth Bubblers don't seal very well, although I would imagine this isn't a big problem during active fermentation, since more CO2 is still being generated to push the O2 out of the airlock. My gut feeling is that the only advantage one of these has over a bucket is that it is transparent. I'd probably use it like I use a bucket - OK for a few weeks, but I wouldn't do any long-term aging in one.

Although let the record show that the lid on my brew bucket has a death-grip on the bottom part and takes a ton of force to remove.

 

yeah, but I have one. Seals up as tight as a Mason jar. Same principle, lid under a threaded ring. Mine's pretty new, bought in January 2015. Maybe they changed something before I got mine. Way different from a bucket/lid combo IMO.

(I don't leave beer in fermenters forever anyway. Anything longer than 3 weeks I'm going to transfer to age in a corny)