I've worried and fretted over this since September. I pushed the stopper too hard and it popped down into the carboy - WITH THE CIDER/SUGAR/YEAST IN IT (of course). I ended up just sticking another rubber stopper and airlock into the neck of the carboy and fermenting my hard cider with the old stopper in it. Calm down, it was sterile! Today was the day to rack the cider. Which I did. And then . . . what to do with the carboy and bung?
Well, Hubby, being the fix-it guy he is, went to the home-brew place in town and asked. Here's the complicated 3-step process:
1. You take your basic plastic grocery bag, twist up the bottom only enough so it fits into your bottle, and gently fit it almost all the way in.
2. Turn your bottle (carboy, jug, whatever) upside down and jiggle it a bit until the stopper is trapped between the bag and the side of the bottle (depending upon the size of the bottle, you may need to blow a little air into the bag at this point - just be prepared to do whatever you gotta do to trap the stopper against the side of the bottle).
3. Pull on the bag.
Et viola.
This works with glass or plastic bottles and carboys: likewise with corks or rubber stoppers.
Thanks, Home-brew Dudes! Thanks Hubby, for asking the question (and knowing who to ask). OK. On to the next crisis. And I take back my earlier rant about the evils of the plastic grocery bag.