Plastic fermenters are MUCH safer (I am one of the many who have gotten minor cuts from shattering glass carboys) but just plain terrible for fermenting in. A little scratch in the wall and your sanitizing process will miss the wild yeast that grows in the scratch making the container essentially useless for fermenting with your chosen yeast only.
Also they make widemouth glass carboys which are very easy to clean. But they shatter all the same.
If your going to avoid glass go 304 stainless (SSBrewtechs BrewBucket etc.) plus it basically lasts forever.
They fly in helicopters and can shoot that many in a day. Its usually very large areas (thousands of acres) with a surrounding game fence. Since the hogs have no natural predators they have to be removed somehow and this is one common route. Vastly different scenario then a small 50 acre place.
Any brewery can get you dextrose much cheaper than $2/lb. I think we are paying around $0.55/pound or something close to that in my area (Texas) for a 50lb bag.
Note this is a shortage currently on dextrose because of all the hard seltzers appearing in the market so quickly and using it all up, so it will probably go up as these keep growing.
I added a small cafe in Aug last year to my existing brewery's taproom because food was required by the state to reopen. I had no prior experience in running a small cafe (we do mostly paninis and similar). My thoughts roughly a year later is that food is one terrible business. We are close to braking even over that time, minus buildout. We have a wonderful staff and have been blessed with no issues in that department. But other problems are always popping up. Such as pork prices have doubled in the last 3 months. Bread went up about 15% and lots of other things change a lot order to order. We can't change our menu every week, so some weeks a sandwich is perfectly priced, while the next its food cost is 40%. Basically there are just so many moving parts, that change so frequently, so much inventory that expires in just a few days (vegs). So little max potential profit. It's usually a goal of 25-30% food cost, 30% labor cost, 40% to overhead and hopefully of that 10-15% profit (Assuming you didn't piss away 20-30% to a delivery service). I have found that being such a small operation we have yet to really hit the 30/30(60%) its more like a 65-80% in ingredients and labor. Which vary wildly from week to week as customer traffic varies. If sales were to triple overnight we could more easily get it lower and into range of the 30/30 or possibly even 25/25. Just because there would be less wasted food, less wasted staff potential, and more room for improvements. Which brings me to the point of this long paragraph. It seems (from my limited experience) like a restaurant that can't get enough sales for its appropriate overhead size, struggles. I am fortunate enough that we make enough coin to live on the rest of the business and don't need the income from the cafe, but it sure is a lot of work for very little reward that I would never want to mindfully walk into.
There is nothing that can grow during fermentation in beer or wine that will hurt you. It will just taste terrible, or unplanned.
In lower abv fermentation such as kombucha or fermented vegetables. Molds can be a risk if the starting medium is not low enough ph, or high enough salinity.
This is not at all common in beer brewing. I cannot speak for the wine world but most of them have variable height lids.
No brewery would ever put glass marbles into a primary fermenter. As a professional brewer we routinely try to have the beer touch as few items as possible, post chill, due to sanitation risks. Not only would marbles be a nightmare to sanitize (tiny chips or cracks would not be properly sanitized), its a logistical nightmare to later get them out to clean the tank. Tanks are cleaned in place with a pump and spray ball method without ever opening the tank. Getting excessive hops out is enough work much less marbles.
Breweries purge any air out of a tank with Co2 before filling, for multiple reasons, but since Co2 is heavier than air it will settle on top of the unfermented wort as it is gently transferred into the fermentation tank thus removing the need for any kind of marbles or headspace reduction.
A second major reason this would not be done is that when beer ferments it needs extra headspace as the yeast in an ale ferments on top of the beer. A hefeweizen will routinely create a yeast layer about 10-15% of the height on top of the liquid. So if this space was blocked it would be forced out the top, which for most modern breweries would create a large mess into the floor drains and lead to the yeast count being too low reuse.
On the flip side I would be very interested to know of a brewery doing this and why.
Even those that serve lower end wine worry about it. (Our max bottle is $14ish wholesale). I run a brewery that also serves wine and our bottle loss is a significant enough percentage of our total wine sales, because of our low throughput. It commonly happens that a bottle goes "bad" with only 1 pour from the bottle thus returning a loss on that bottle.
Even with the bottles that leave two pours, at expiration, we are making a few dollars but not enough to keep the lights on.
- And maximum age of US public officials (especially presidents) set to a similar limit.