Open top or closed with bung access?
There is a coop a few miles from here that I get barrels from. Usually they had some sort of concentrate in them like orange juice or Dr Pepper. These were quite easy to clean out. Flush them a few times and the world is fine!
My sister wanted 6 barrels to cut in half for planters, said OK. All they had at the moment were barrels that were for liquid smoke. Rinse em out and all should be cool! Wrong!!! The liquid smoke remaining in these barrels was like tar! The first one was cut in half to clean it out, and nothing would touch this stuff. Not soaps, hot water, scrubbing, 2800 psi pressure washer, nothing!
I felt really miserable about this.
I took the barrels back and shoved them in a storage area in my shop. What to do with these things?
A few months later I had an auction to liquidate a bunch of stuff. Auction boss says, what about these barrels? FDA approved? Yep, PP and they once contained Liquid Smoke. Ever use them for something else?, Nope, this is the way I got them. He checks them out and says, Yep, smells like smoke, looks clean! (meaning that I wasn't previously using these to store nuclear waste)
He list's them as FDA approved food grade barrels that previously contained Liquid Smoke as a flavor additive. OK, now I can get rid of them.
This was a 3 day online auction. A bidding war ensued at the end for these barrels, and the 5 available went for 40.00 each, to one bidder.
I paid 6 bucks each, so I made out.
Funny thing is tho. They could have driven 4 miles east on the same road my shop was on and purchased 36, 55 gallon fruit juice barrels, which they had at the time, for the same price.
Auctions are quite unpredictable.
