No glass carboys

After spending my entire evening last night trying to degas my second winekit I decided this is not how I wish to spend my evening.
I love the kitmaking but hate this degassing process even with a drill.
After two hours it seemed hardly any progress was made the small bubbles still appeared in abundance.

I would love to switch to a vacuumpump but the problem is that there are no glass carboys available in my country.
(winekits for some reason seem impopular in the Netherlands/Belgium/Germany and only cheap kits are sold).

There are glass fermentation bottles like these:



They are however 25 ltr.
Can they savely be used for the clearing stage of the wine or is this too much headroom?

If I want to bulk age I could always transfer the wine to the plastic carboy after a week....
The glass would hopefully enable me to use a vacuumpump of some sorts...

Not sure how long you age your wines in carboys but if you do, you really do not need to degass. The wine will degass itself as it ages. I age for a year and it is very rarely that I have to degass.

With a drill, I wouldn't spend more than 5 minutes degassing. After that, you are risking adding O2. The small bubbles may be just from agitation, and not from CO2 coming out.

You need a reversible drill. Drill in one direction until the surface of the wine starts to rotate. Then, switch directions. You want to maintain a calm surface in order to minimize O2.

The all-in-one headspace eliminator may work on 25 liter demijohns. Talk with Steve about that.

In any case, what Julie said. let time do the work.

I''m afraid I really overdid it then.
Luckily its a white wine that probably won't survive the summer anyway.

Hi Dutch, Even if small glass carboys are unavailable I wonder if milk, orange juice, apple juice or wine is sold in 5 L glass containers? If they are, I would be pretty certain that drilled bungs that fit the mouths of such containers are also available and you can simply use those jugs which for all intents and purposes are "carboys" - all you really need is for the jug to be glass and for the jug to have a narrow neck and mouth to ensure a minimum of air space (compare that to the wide mouth of a mason jar used for pickles or jams and the like) .

i know there is 20 liter demijohns of the kind you have found Dutch or at least they are pretty common in germany and sweden.
If you ever go for a vacation in sweden i know they even got 6 gallon glas carboys here.

Thats correct, they have these in 10, 15, 20, 25 and 35 ltrs.
But splitting a batch in smaller parts does not really attract me since I don't have much space to begin with.

Weird that these 6 gallon glass carboys are sold in sweden, in the UK but not around here. Are they used for anything else besides brewing?

But since it seems I don't need to degas as long as I did there may not be a problem after all.

i think it's alot about our high taxes here in sweden. not sure what they are originally used for, but here its just for brewing.

I guess you could just order some online. I'm a complete newbie but thus far I've ordered all my kit from the UK as they have good range of one gallon kits on offer. You can get bulk shipping for up to 25kg so even though it would probably be expensive to only get a glass carboy, if you also buy several kits at the same time it wouldn't be an issue. While not suitable for vacuum pumps it's quite easy to degas a small plastic carboy as it's weight consists only of wine. That said I haven't really had any gas left at the three week point that kits instruct to degas with my one gallon kits.

I am POSITIVE you over stirred it. I did the exact same thing on my second kit in Dec 2012. It was a WE VR cab. Still using it as a cooling wine.

With a white, just drink away.

@ min with a drill is enough

I drilled my first wine for over half an hour (thats after causing a vulcano) and its still fizzy.

I ordered a glass carboy in the UK along with my next kit.
Shipping costs combined 8 pound.
So for the kit currently brewing (Beaverdale Barollo) I can test some vacuum tricks.