StillSmart

Hi. Whilst looking for some good quality, reasonably sized vessels for fermenting, I found these on the Bay.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/221320516178? ... EBIDX%3AIT

They look just the job, good nick and at 45 litres, leaves plenty of headroom on a 30 odd litre mash, which is ideal for my 50 litre keg/boiler. Question is, they have been used to ship mango chutney, has anybody tried using these, and was there any problem with flavour contamination?

Cheers, John.

All I can say John is, on a beer forum a while back a guy asked at his local takeaway for one of these mango tubs. He asked the same Q as you and was told that they were ok as they were food grade.

Thanks for that. I was just a tad concerned that the chutney may have tainted the plastic. I'm quite happy with them being food grade. I suppose after a good clean out, they should be OK.

The price is close to a regular fermenter from Wilcos, £13 something iirc. If having a 30L wash is important to you, no problem to add more water to a regular fermenter once the initial fury has died down. I used to do a white wine that ended up with a full fermenter.

I have a couple of Wilko 25 litre screwtop, and a couple of their "bucket" style ones. They are a bit long in the tooth, having served me well for a few years of ale brewing, but they are a bit small. These look a bit more robust, and easier to handle when full, than the 25L buckets. They will be used for all grain mashing, and won't be full for long, 4-5 days typically, so won't be using air locks. Being able to mash and sparge a 30+ litre mash will be more convenient. I think the thicker wall will be better, as I will probably fit ball valves.

In that case, they're a good price if you need the full lid. With the single price delivery, not much harm in getting 2 more than you need, assuming space and finances can handle it.

Agree on the Wilco beer buckets being flimsy. Mine got turned into an amazingstill. Did 2 runs, beautiful product, then learned plastic is a no-no.

I'm just about to order a couple, will report back.

I use recycled food grade containers as fermenters. They previously contained olives, chilli, ginger or coke syrup.
All of them cleaned up just fine. A soak in one of the active sanitisers strips any residual flavours away. Just treat the first fermentation as junkahol for cleaning, and next time the fermenter should be good for use.