Booze Bladder Bucket

Our fruit wines are hit and miss, but this bladder bucket isn't.

[See photo, new bladder-bucket (left); 7 gallons of Apple Wine bubbling away (center); the old bladder-in-a-box  method (right); and an unused bladder for reference (front).]

We tried bottling for a couple years, but it was so time-consuming and difficult to store.  We then went to 3-liter plastic bladders, and finally graduated to 20-liter bladders.  We can fit most of our 7-gallon "Fermonster" into a 20 liter bladder, leaving a couple of gallons for bottles/friends/immediate consumption.

For the last three years, we've been keeping those 20-liter wine bladders in regular (tape-reinforced) cardboard boxes.  We keep those boxes in the cool garage, just waltz in with a cup when we need a hit of hootch.  Those boxes have worked well  -- repeat use each year, no problems -- but each time we bag, we spill a little on the box, and the box steadily weakens and goes out of square.  And the boxes have no handles, so they're a bit hard to maneuver, especially when full.

This year, to avoid making new hard-to-handle boxes, we're trying a 5-gallon plastic bucket to hold the 20-liter bag.  We drilled a 1/2" hole near the bottom, widened it to 1-1/8" with an Exacto knife, then press fit the black faucet through the hole, into the bladder receptacle.

We filled the bladder via siphon into the screw-top, and the bladder held nicely.  The full bladder fits the 5-gallon bucket just about perfectly.  And the bucket has a handle, making it much, much easier to move around.

Interesting! Any idea how this would work for something with bubbles like beer or kombucha? Bottling is seriously the worst part of brewing.

Plastic bladders are a god-send for many wine applications.  No air enters as it empties, so almost no chance of getting "corked".   They're cheap, reusable (rinse and keep in a freezer), have a high capacity, and are very light.  They will not hold pressure, though, so bubbly is not an option.  On the plus-side, CO2 build-up is immediately apparent (the bladder expands like a balloon), and burping the bladder is easy.