loved them until one cracked! I had purchased two sets, one large one small, and had successfully used them for months. However, when I opened my last jar of sauerkraut, I found that one of the small pebbles had cracked internally. Thankfully, it did not send shards throughout the sauerkraut. I am attempting to contact the company to see what can be done.

I ordered this set of weights on October 28, 2015. A few days later, they were washed and went into hot pepper ferments that sat on my counter until the end of August 2016. We went to blend our peppers to make our hot sauce, and 3 out of 4 of the jars had broken weights in them (all broken weights were the wide mouth weights). Super disappointed that we lost all of that time and precious peppers due to broken glass. I think I'll try boiling some rocks or something less expensive than these weights once we have enough peppers to try again...

Let me tell you the story of why I would never buy these, or anything from this company, again.

The first time I used them I was weighting down two jars of sauerkraut. One jar was just fine, but in the other a shard of glass about 3/4 of an inch long and about 1/8 of an inch wide cracked off the weight and ended up in the sauerkraut itself. I discovered this the hard way when I bit down on a fork full of food and felt an unexpected crunch as the glass broke between my molars (but thankfully didn't pierce any skin). I actually wasn't even mad at the time; every company has a bad unit here and there, and luckily the shard didn't hurt me. I threw out the broken weight and glass-contaminated sauerkraut and moved on.

Fast forward to tonight: I just opened another jar of sauerkraut I've been fermenting for about a month, only to discover the weight I had in the jar had literally cracked in half. That's right, there were two separate, about equal-sized pieces of glass that came out of my jar. Another batch ruined.

Now that two weights have independently broken and got glass in two separate batches of food, I'm ready to believe this is just a terrible product, made with a minimum of quality control, that I was unfortunate enough to purchase.

To address a few common possible causes:

* The sauerkraut was fermenting at room temperature and was not subject to large temperature fluctuations
* The weights were stored in their original packaging, inside the protective foam, when not being used
* The weights were never dropped or otherwise mishandled, and were only hand washed.

There is no logical explanation for two of the four weights to independently break during normal use, so I have to conclude this is just an extremely poor product. I heavily dissuade literally anyone from purchasing these for any use.

Good product, and does the job weighing down my fermented foods. If I had it to do over again I would just buy the Plus size ones. I use Fido style (bale top) jars and need to use 2 or 3 smaller sized ones to weigh down the veggies. They even seem a little small for mason jars.

I don't know the cost of material that goes into making these products, but they seem pretty expensive for what they are (glass disks). I guess that is the price of enjoying a hipster approved hobby.

I love making different recipes and flavors of fermented vegetables, and even though I have a (pretty big) fermentation crock, I've found that I really prefer the simplicity of using Mason jars. You can watch the fermentation process, stick the jars straight into the fridge when they're done "fermenting" for storage, and it's easy to wash and reuse the jars over and over. I've tried a couple different ways of trying to weigh down the veggies to keep it under the brine while fermenting, but these pickle pebbles have been just what I'm looking for. My wide-mouth sized ones seem to fit perfectly in the quart-size wide mouth jars, they're thick and heavy enough to hold things under the brine, without being too large and taking up too much room. You do need to leave enough space at the top of the jar so they sit down under the actual mouth, or they can be a bit hard to get out if there isn't enough room to "tip" them to grab an edge and pull out. I also like that they are glass, so they don't absorb smells and can be easily cleaned for the next batch.