Once you drain the high-fructose corn syrup solution from the bottle, is it of any use?

If you drink soda — pop, Coke, or whatever you call fizzy sugar water in your neck of the woods — you know what PET bottles are. These plastic bottles are used in the soda industry because they are lightweight and retain carbon dioxide (CO₂) in carbonated beverages. Many homebrewers wonder if these would make suitable beer containers. There certainly would be a variety of benefits to using them.

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A stainless steel malt sieve at the (512) Brewery in Austin, TX. (Photo by Ed Peters.)

Most homebrewers learn how to achieve a workable crush by trial and error. They may start by reading descriptions of how crushed malt should look like. (For example, it should contain X% big pieces of husk, Y% small pieces of endosperm (coarse grits) and Z% fine grits and flour. About a third of each is one standard description.) They may look at pictures in a book or magazine of properly crushed malt and then proceed to experiment on their own, crushing progressively more finely to get better extract efficiency and stopping when they encounter lautering problems. While the trial and error methods works in practice —  at least eventually — there is an objectively way measure your mill output before mashing. This would allow you to fine tune your crush before mashing the grains, including when you switch mills or mill grains that require a mill gap adjustment. The method involves sifting the mill output through a series of sieves and weighing the amount of material retained on each sieve.

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Two roughly 5-gallon (19-L) batches of old ale fermenting inside two pumpkins.

A couple years ago, I brewed a pumpkin ale. The beer was an old ale — an Old Peculiar clone — spiced with traditional pumpkin pie spice. But I decided to take things one step further and ferment the beer inside a pumpkin. That year, I was growing some large pumpkin varieties in my garden. Two of the pumpkins were large enough that I estimated they would hold about 5.0 gallons (19 L) of beer apiece. On brewday, I made 10 gallons (38 L) of wort and cooled it down. While the wort was chilling, I cut the pumpkins open (with a sanitized knife) and scooped out the “guts” (with a large, sanitized spoon). You always want your fermentation vessels to be food grade and pumpkins are not only food grade, they’re actually food. Likewise, you always want your fermenters to be sanitized. And, unless it was diseased, the inside of a pumpkin should not be infected with microorganisms.

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