Of glass and plastic (Apologies to John Steinbeck)
Luckiy for me, my Dad is an avid garage sale afficionado. I haven't yet bought carbuoys at retail price. . .which is nice. I asked him about three weeks ago to get me about ten when he could. He called me a week later and told me to come and get them because they were taking up room in his workshop! I owed him $10 for the whole deal. Seems he found someone who's late father was a delivery man for a local bottled water vendor, and he had a bunch of them. He bought them for a buck a piece. Nice deal Dad!!
To me the biggest risk with glass is breakage, so you mitigate that with proper handling and storage. That means diligence and planning, as well as a rotation, sanitation, storage and transportation (moving the bottles around) procedure that you follow every time. I normally ferment in my corney kegs. I've made beer and fermented in glass carbuoys, and have decided that I'll do the same with my mead.
I use 1.5 litre PET mineral water bottles from Croatia for short term storage in my refrigerator and daily drinking pleasure. I don't know if the plastic is actually PET, but I have yet to smell any residual aromas, odors or anything else. I have reused them several times, and had them in the refrigerator for several weeks at a time with mead in them. I'm sure someone can make an argument that there is an odor, after all at the molecular level plastic is permeable. But if I can't smell it, and it doesn't produce any off-flavors or taint my mead in any way, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
I use these plastic containers to take my mead to parties for mass consumption so I don't have to lug a bunch of bottles with me. I dispense into them from my kegs. I have a separate converted refrigerator where I keep my kegs in my meadworx house outside.
I'm pretty stingy with my glass champagne bottles (750 ml) and rarely take them to parties, or over to friends houses because I don't like lugging empties around in my truck. Sometimes they also sprout legs and walk off, or get thrown away. My bottles are generally reserved for my own use, sometimes gifts (with a promise of more if they return the bottles) dates, special evenings, family gatherings, etc.
I'm looking forward to using the glass carbuoys as primary and secondary. I haven't used plastic for fermentation yet, so I'll have to do some homework and decide if I want to or not.
Sorry for the verbose post, but Jmattioli got me thinking about the subject, so I decided to ramble on a bit. Hope it was at least entertaining.
Cheers,
Oskaar