Stainless Steel 7 Gal Fermenter w/ 3-Piece Ball Valve – Durable Kettle for Wine, Beer, Mead, & Kombucha, Ideal for 5 Gal Batches – Home & Craft Brewers Fermentation Bucket

This is an excellent next step for DIY brewers. Before this I spent a lot of time, carefully cleaning plastic buckets (soak in PBW, etc.). Now, I use anything I want to clean this metal bucket. This means I can now brew more and worry less about contamination. Build quality is great. Heat level is mitigated by the handles. It is really easy to use and especially clean and it also takes standard attachments like a hose adapter. I have found no issues with leakage.

Awesome fermenter

Great fermenter, especially for the price - seals well, easy to clean (except the ball valve), and you can do single-vessel fermentation (boil and ferment in the same pot), which saves lots of hassle. Small con: the stamped gallon markers can be off because they're stamped too high or low - but once you figure out by how much, it's not a problem (for mine, the the bottom of the gallon number, rather than the middle of it, is where the true 1-gallon, 2-gallon, etc. amount is).Con: cleaning the ball valve. Take it apart after a batch and look at it - you'll find gunk inside. This isn't Chapman's fault - this is true of all ball valves. You'll need to disassemble it and soak/clean it either every batch, or every few batches. If you're boiling in this vessel this might not be an issue - when the ball valve is closed the only place for a little gunk to get caught (despite soaking the whole bucket in oxiclean/PBW/whatever) is a few of the internal threads of the ball valve which are exposed to the wort. If you're boiling, my bet is that this gunk will get sterilized - thus only need to clean it every few brews. But if you're just using it as a fermenter without boiling you'll need to think about cleaning that ball valve every time. It's not hard, and probably takes less than 5 minutes of work. If you want to speed up the process, there's easier-to-disassemble ball valves out there that you can swap in. Again - not Chapman's fault - it's gonna show up on every fermenter with a valve, but something to be aware of. Thus I'm not taking a star off for it.

This is my initial impressions after just receiving this fermenter yesterday. I haven't used it yet and haven't even filled it with water to confirm it won't leak, but I'm fairly confident thus far.First thoughts are that it looks too small to be 7 gallons. But I'm going to assume it's the shape. It fits nicely inside my temperature control freezer, with room for a 5 gallon glass carboy as well, very nice!.The stainless looks good. Everything was smooth and polished. I took the ball valve apart and it looks solid. Comes with extra rubber gaskets for the port and the lid's hole for the airlock. I am thinking I'll drill out the top to allow for a regular drilled stopper. That will allow me to use my auto siphon for bigger brews that have lots of yeast and will likely settle above the port.All in all, I really like the look of this and can't wait to brew and fill it with its first batch. I'll be sure to update once I've done that and had a full fermentation completed and racked to secondary.***************************************************UPDATE: 5/20/16I've used this for my first batch - a Double IPA. I had no issues with the fermenter. Sealed well and after a week I racked to secondary with an Auto-Siphon to see if the port was buried in yeast/trub. Yep, it was completely covered, so the port wouldn't have worked on that batch - maybe a more simple brew with less surgar/hops. I kept the original bung for the airlock. Worked fine, but I'm still leaning toward drilling it out to use a standard drilled bung and to allow for my auto-siphon to fit without having to take off the lid.I've pre-ordered a 7 Gallon Chapman Brewing fermenter without the port - they are back ordered at this time - I'll use this as secondary for all but my most basic brews. It works well, but the port is just too low for most of my needs. Otherwise, a well made product that is pretty darn nice.I'd say 4 starts is fair due to the port being a little low and the gallon markings being a bit off.

First off, the fermenter I got is apparently different from some other reviews - mine came with a full sized bung hole, centered in the lid big enough for an auto siphon if you needed one. Plus the black Chapman sticker on the front, is now an embossed stainless logo (embossed into the same metal as the kettle). The graduation markings are embossed as well, so no worries about scraping them off (half gallon markings).I received my fermenter about 3 days after ordering it, but unfortunately, the ball valve assembly was missing. I understand that this could happen. Mistakes happen. I contacted the seller, and a ball valve was sent out.FYI the ball valve has a 1/2 inch NPT female connection, and you need to supply a 1/2 inch barbed nipple - preferably stainless also. I went with 1/2 NPT to 3/8 O.D sold on Amazon. PS - you need some Teflon tape also (plumbers tape).I boiled 5 gallons of water in my setup, to clean it and check for leaks. Tossed it straight onto my gas range on full flame, no problems. Beer bubbling now!