Not for brewing but I have cut a few open to use as water butts. Ours had a few dregs of red wine in them, a surprisingly nice wine smell and a severe crusting of dried wine, almost crystalline, around much of the inside. Scraping it off was not effective and it took weeks and several changes of water to get to the stage where rainwater stayed mostly clear. Not sure how that would affect the beer but a high gravity brew is definitely what you'd need to offset the wine. One of the problems is that you have to risk an awful lot of beer to find out - definitely one for a group of willing contributors. I think one of the homebrew clubs did a similar thing a year or two ago. I don't recall reading the outcome though.Cazamodo wrote:Anyone ave any experience of something like this?
