Glass Vs Plastic Bottles for Homebrew

[CAL]

I've been doing homebrew beer kits for a quite a few years now and almost always bottle the brew in 1L plastic bottles. I've never had a problem with this and found that I can keep the brew up to two years without any problems (controlled experiment, it doesn't normally stay around that long).

The last brew I did I put some in plastic bottles and some in 2 pint glass bottles. I opened one of the glass bottles last night and it tasted off - that fruity, just on the turn kind of flavour. The beer was gassy (took 6 pints of space to decant the 2 pints from the bottle) so I know it hadn't gone off in the bottle.

The bottles are very old (my grandads) but the rubber seals are new and they were cleaned / disinfected before I put the ale in so I know its not got infected.

Has anyone else had this or did I just pick up a bad bottle (there is another one cooling now so i can see if its affected the batch). All the ale from plastic bottles has been fine.

 

[Everything Mac]

did they get warm?

 

[British Red]

I use glass almost exclusively - Grolsch when I can (only got about 100 sadly) and crown bottles with a crowning gun otherwise. Never had a bad one yet - I disinfect well with an egg cup of bleach in 1 gallon of water and rinse twice. I find no more than 1/2 a tsp of sugar to charge is required whatever the recipe says.

Only plastic I use is in barrels - but I plan to change them for metal as time permits


Beer by British Red, on Flickr

Red

 

[gregorach]

I moved from plastic bottles to glass at least partly because I wasn't entirely satisfied with the sanitisation of plastic... (I also wasn't happy with the seals, or the fact they were clear.)

One thing to be aware of is that if you're not regularly "calibrating" your palette, you can get used to almost anything. You might have become accustomed to slightly "skunked" beer, so that beer that isn't skunked tastes off to you... I've heard some real horror stories about certain beer judges on the Scottish circuit, and then there's the CAMRA mob always complaining if their beer isn't oxidised enough... So don't take it as a slur on your character.

As for priming sugar, I bulk prime at a rate of 4g light spraymalt per litre.

 

[CAL]

I think it might just be a bad one. I definitely have a palette tuned to homebrew now but think that mine is generally OK, it gets passed out to non homebrew drinkers often enough and no one complains (and they would if they could...).

I don't think it got overly warm. The only doubt I have is that it might not have been clean enough - they are the very dark brown bottles so I might have missed something somewhere.

Looks like I'll have to try the rest...

 

[gregorach]

Looks like I'll have to try the rest...

Oh no!

For bottle cleaning, I find a good long soak in a strong, hot solution of VWP reaches the parts that other sanitisers miss. Just remember to rinse very thoroughly afterwards (3 rinses with cold mains water is my usual), or you'll end up with TCP.