Customer Reviews

3 Piece Plastic Airlock (Sold in sets of 3)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

These are simple (and very affordable!), effective, and amazingly convenient for making your own wine at home. Note that you MUST also purchase stoppers with holes if you don't already have them. (They really ought to be sold together to save on shipping!)

I was having trouble making cherry and blackberry wines because of the fruit being pushed by the bubbles up into the balloons, causing them to tip over and spill syrup all over the place. A few days into fermenting, I switched my balloons out for these along with "Drilled Rubber Stopper (Carboy Bung Sets of 3)", and have been incredibly happy! No more spills, just little bubbles and clean airlocks & bungs!

If you're using a plastic milk-gallon jug, you probably should fill the airlock with vodka instead of water, since when you pick up and set down (or even push in on the sides)the milk jug, water can get sucked through the airlock down into the fermenter. Now, I have done many gallons with just water and had it suck back in, yet NEVER a spoiled batch. To be on the safe side, you can fill your airlock with vodka instead. Note that with glass jugs (empty applejuice jugs!), this is NOT a risk.

This style of airlock is far superior to the "s" shape airlocks for one major reason. It is pretty much impossible for contaminated or "outside" air or fluid to make it past this airlock and into your fermenter. With the older style "s" locks, it was just too easy for the fluid acting as a barrier between the clean fermenter and the "bugs" in the outside air to be sucked backwards into the fermenter, thus exposing your beer to contamination.

Get a few of these and you won't regret it!

Great little gadget. Filled it with vodka as per another reviewer.
I drilled a hole in the lid of my Mr. Beer fermenters so I could glue these in and they would have a proper airlock.

I have found this to be the best style of airlock to use. It is cheap, simple in concept, and very easy to clean. A couple of useful comments and tips:

There are different ways to use this. If you are fermenting in a jug or carboy, you use it with a drilled stopper; the stopper size depends upon the diameter of the opening of your jug. You can also use this for fermenting in a food-grade plastic bucket. In this case you insert this through a grommet that is in the bucket lid. The reason they don't give you a stopper or grommet is because there is no way of knowing whether you're using a pail lid, or what size jug you have.

It is best to fill this not with water, but with some kind of food-safe sanitized liquid (i.e., not bleach water). As with any airlock, there are situations where some of the airlock liquid can be sucked back into what you're fermenting. If you are using plain water, it can pick up microbes and bacteria which can contaminate your liquid. Risk of contamination from this isn't a major concern, but an easy way to not worry about it is to fill it with something like cheap vodka. If any of that gets sucked back in, it won't affect the taste of what you're making.

If you are using this for long-term bulk aging of a wine or beer, make sure to check on the liquid level every few weeks to a month to make sure it doesn't evaporate away. These have a liquid fill line to let you know the proper amount of liquid you need.

If you're expecting a very vigorous fermentation, this can easily be converted into a blowoff tube. You can trim off the very bottom of the plastic to completely open up the hole. Then by not using the lid or the floating piece, you can attach a 3/16" tube directly to the top of the tube. I do this when making hefeweizens that are very vigorous fermentors. However, if you have a lot of whole hops or fruit, it may clog the relatively small hole and you might want to consider going to a much larger diameter blowoff tube.

By the way, if you're making wine using balloons, you really ought to consider switching to this or something else. Even a simple piece of aluminum foil covering the jug opening is more consistent and much less likely for contamination than using a balloon.

This three-pack is good quality, a little thinner plastic than my other 3-piece locks, but perfectly usable. Another difference I noticed was that the bottom opening has no grid over the opening. At first I thought this was a cut-corner to keep price low, but after a couple of active fermentation that bubbled into the chamber I appreciate how much easier this design is to clean. It also will not plug with hops as easy, so should be safer than my others.

I bought this as a replacement for my airlock for my fermenting bucket since I lost the slotted cap. When the product spec said it came as a three pack, for some reason I thought it meant the insert, the floating piece and the cap, turned out it was three airlocks. Obvious? Perhaps, but I was quite pleased. Thanks!

I purchased a set of 3 of these and I have one left. The other two were great the one time that I was able to use them, but upon trying to use them a second time one cracked and the other snapped off at the stem. I have since purchased airlocks that are not so fragile.

These are a must have for the beer and wine makers.
BUT these are over priced 200%.
You can get these from Rebel Brewer .99 each + $2.99 shipping.
You are getting ripped if you pay $2.99 + $4-$5 shipping.

I am so very pleased as this was exactly what my friend needed.He now has extra as I had ordered the other items and it came with only one plastic airlock and he wanted extra.Thanks again for very prompt service,Amazon! Happy new Year,2012! Thelma L.

These are a very effective airlock. You can install it and then poor in the vodka,iodine water or whatever you want to use (don't use chlorine water) and away you go. The best part about these is that they are EASY to clean. The S shaped airlocks are too difficult to clean (re impossible). The only negative is that the S shaped airlocks are slightly easier to see the bubbling action coming through them. So bottom line for me is that if money is no object, you might consider the S shaped airlocks if you want to see the action better, but you need to throw out after each use in my opinion. And if like me, you replace airlock with a clean one about 5x with each batch, then you see the ridiculousness of S shaped airlocks. If you want to reuse the airlocks, then these are the way to go. I put only four stars because the bubbling action is a little harder to see.