2010
Home Brewing: How to Get the Rubber Stopper Out of a Glasss Carboy
A few weeks back I had transferred my beer from the primary fermenter into the secondary fermenter Glass Carboy.
After all the beer was transferred to bottles and ready for the stopper and airlock, I proceeded to put it in place. The stopper, and the glass carboy were both wet, so when I applied a little pressure to the stopper to fit onto the carboy, it shot right through the opening and into the beer.
I didn’t have a choice but to tape up the top of the carboy with the airlock in place. It worked well though!
Once it came time to get the stopper out, I was a little nervous to how I was going to do it, but it turned out to be pretty easy to get a rubber stopper out of a glass carboy.
How to get a Rubber Stopper out of a Glass Carboy
Once you are done transferring all your beer from the glass carboy into bottles, rinse out the inside of the carboy. Easy to do outside with a hose.
Once the carboy is all rinsed out, just grab a pair of needle nose pliers. Hold the glass carboy upside down so that the rubber stopper will come as close to the opening as possible. You may have to juggle it up and down a little to get it into the right position to grab.
Get the rubber stopper so that the hole in the center is facing down, towards the opening of the carboy. Stick your pliers into the carboy and have on of the ends of the needle nose pliers go through the hole in the rubber stopper, and have the other go on the outside of the stopper. Squeeze tight and yank it out.
It should slip right out, but make sure the glass and the rubber stopper are both wet. If its dry, you will have some trouble getting that thing out.
Good luck… and don’t feel dumb, it happens to the best of us when learning how to brew at home!
2010
Why Use a Secondary Fermenter, What Does a Secondary Fermeneter Do?
Beer in Primary Fermenter After Two Weeks
After a week or two in the primary fermenter, your beer may have quite a bit of foam on top still and will probably be pretty cloudy looking.
A secondary fermenter is used to help clean the beer up. It will give it a much more clean taste, make it less cloudy, and help clear out a lot of the dead yeast and sediment.
So after your beer has had time for its initial fermentation, which may be a week or two, you will siphon your beer into a secondary fermenter. The secondary fermeneter should be a glass container (carboy), and it should be the exact size of your batch of beer. So if you are brewing a 5 gallon batch of beer, chances are you used a 6 – 6.5 gallon fermenter bucket, which is perfect. But when you siphon the beer into a secondary fermentor, you should use a 5 gallon glass carboy. This way there is little to no air space in there with the beer.
Too much air could oxidize the beer. So when you are siphoning the beer into the secondary fermenter, make sure that you don’t splash the beer around, getting air bubbles in it. Try to siphon the beer down the side of the secondary fermeneter, without splashing at all.
Secondary Fermenter (Glass Carboy)
Once you have your beer in the secondary fermeneter (Glass Carboy) you will be able to see the clarity of the beer in the carboy. You should start to see the yeast settle and he beer clear up in about a week.
Once your beer is ready to bottle, you will have much cleaner tasting and clearer looking beer than if you didn’t use a secondary fermenter! A secondary fermenter is not a necessary step in home brewing, but if you are looking to get a better tasting beer with less yeast in it, and have a more true color, we would definitely recommend trying it.
Primary fermenter Photo Credit