Siphon with VacuVin

frisbee91 · 10-04-2011, 01:49 PM

Hi There!

I'm relatively new to beer brewing (I usually do wine), and was surprised to read the issues with siphoning by mouth. I've always used this method for my wines with a freshly-sanitized siphon tube with no ill effects.

But I am heeding the warnings of the homebrewers and avoiding mouth germs in my beer. I'm also a minimalist, and would like to avoid buying another gadget that I have to sanitize.

I have one of these "Vacu Vin" wine stoppers that has a rubber stopper and a little hand vacuum pump you can use to temporarly seal and "evacuate" an unfinished bottle of wine. This makes a quick and simple gadget to start a siphon.

1. Sanitize the vacuvin rubber stopper
2. Place the stopper on the end of the sanitized siphon tube. My tube fits nicely inside the stopper.
3. 2 quick pumps of the hand pump on the stopper starts the flow.
4. QUICKLY pinch the tube to hold the liquid in the tube while you remove the stopper and place the tube in the recieving vessel. It took me a bit of practice not to make a mess.
5. Siphon away!

It's probably not worth buying one of these gadgets just for siphoning, but if you have one already, or want to use it for wine, it can be a multi-tasking device.

Revrin · 10-05-2011, 06:40 AM

I like to use a universal orange carboy cap with a cane through the center and my CO2 hooked up to the other side. works works very well.

broadbill · 10-05-2011, 12:48 PM

Not a bad little bit of ingenuity! Here is an idea to make this a bit more fool-proof (maybe). If you hose is long enough to have a nice "U" or half-loop in it, use the Vacu-vin to pull the beer into that "U", put the end of the tube into the container you are racking to, then manuever the hose so the beer in the "U" flows into the container.

If the "U" is large enough and you get enough beer in the "U", that might be enough to get the syphon started...