carboys

Well, if youre looking to do a lot of different variaties of a base wine later on, then the jugs might be the way to go. That way you can add oak to some, carbonate others, add fruit to the rest, etc. They do take a lot of space though. I'm pretty much the only one who drinks my wine, so I do 1 gal primary and change up the recipe for each gal so they're a little different, then I can choose which one I like the best and make bigger batches.

mike

i use the 5 gallon and 6 gallon carboys myself . If you have the right recipe you can't have to much wine . It makes it easer to transfer from a 5 gallon to a 5 gallon then all the little bottles . rich

the *best* advice is to get them all. If you're gonna keep at this hobby, sooner or later you'll need all the glasware you can lay hands on. If you have to choose a purchase: you can probably mooch the gallon jugs easier than scamming a free 6 gal cowboy. buy the carboy, then start scouring the recycling bins for the gallon jugs. if you could score the 65G barrel, then gallon jugs ought to be no prob for a master scrounger such as yourself... JMHO. regards, bob

Yeah, I use everything from 7 gallons on down to 3 liters, you can never have too many. I finally started marking how many bottles each carboy holds, I have some 5 gallon carboys that hold over 26 750 ml bottles, most hold 25.5. I really like the little 3 gallon carboys too; they take up very little space and can be used to split batches so you can experiment.

Joe

joe, I am not really in the mood to experiment, although i'll probably vary each 6 gallon batch i'll be starting this year.

but what can you vary? most of the stuff inthe recipies i am evaluating tend to dump all the stuff in the primary and go.