DakotaRules

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When I'm at my computer later tonight I'll shoot it over.

orangehero

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http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/more-durable-auto-siphon-190634/

I think likely the cost to make a SS autosiphon could get you several plastic ones instead.

Revvy

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Every year or so someone starts a thread like this, and it never seems to pan out. So I hope you are more successful. But you might want to read through some of the other threads, there were some ideas about the bottom valve issue.

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Golddiggie

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Any suggestions on what to search under? Don't see anything in the bottom links. If someone else has done some of the design work already, if might make it easier.

I'm not one to give up easily. It might come down to finding the right place to make the first few and then go from there.

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Revvy

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You didn't try searching for threads titled Stainless Steel Auto Siphon ?

Or this one?

The first one has some good info. The second one has a couple pics by swagman of an actual build of one he did.

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overflow

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This and the other concerns everyone has expressed in the thread. I love my auto-siphon, but man, you drop that thing a foot and it cracks. I typically go through about two a year for this reason. Would love to see a stainless version available.

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weirdboy

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You know they have a patent on the design of the autosiphon, right?

That is why there isn't a SS one available commercially. Or a competitor to the existing one, even.

JuanMoore

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Not according to the US patent office. There is a similar patent from 1977 (expired), but nothing for that design. This has already been discussed in the threads Revvy linked above.

emjay

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Definitely, but durability is only a small point for some of us - although I'm sure with the rate people seem to have to replace them, it would likely pay for itself *eventually*for many, if not most people.

But mostly, I've gone to significant costs to making sure the only materials touching my wort/beer are stainless steel, silicone, and glass (the ONLY exceptions, out of necessity, being autosiphons, my pump, and a sintered stone for dissolving O2 into my wort.) But the O2 stone can be boiled, and I sanitize my pump by recirculating boiling wort before cooling/transferring it into my fermenter, and recirculating a boiling oxyclean solution afterwards.

So the autosiphon is quite literally my most vulnerable piece of equipment by far, with regards to infections and spreading them. The durability would help with this somewhat, by not allowing small cracks and scratches to easily form and harbor bacteria, but stainless and silicone also have some other properties making them much more sanitary. The lack of porosity makes it incredibly difficult to harbor bacteria, much easier to clean *perfectly*, and a breeze to sanitize. The ability to even boil the thing in a large enough pot (you'd really only need boiling water to cover half of it, and just flip it upside down to get the other half) would also be fantastic.

You see, some people say that if you brew sours, you should really have two sets of all the plastic equipment - one for normal beers, one for beers with bugs - in order to help prevent infections due to cross-contamination. Even I have often said it, but I still don't find it ideal. For instance, I have a Lambic and a Berliner Weisse in fermentors right now. In case you're unaware, Berliner Weisse uses ONLY brewer's yeast and lactobacillus, while Lambic uses pretty much everything. Having only one autosiphon for sours means risking the contamination of a beer like a Berliner Weisse with, as I said, pretty much everything. Why does it deserve being exposed any more than my non-lacto beers? I've also recently acquired an oak barrel in which I'll be using for Flanders Reds, and picked up all 3 White Labs May/June platinum collection yeasts, which in addition to Belgian Wit 2, includes the Orval strain (which I'll be using to make an Orval clone) and the new American Farmhouse Blend. That's 3 more beers with bugs, and so pretty soon I'll have a total of 5 such beers all going at (or around) the same time, not to mention I'll obviously be brewing others in the future as well.

Again, current practice is to share one autosiphon between all these brews, even though they can still infect each other the same way they can infect "normal beers". Granted, the high acidity many of these develop can make them more resilient, especially as the beers continue to acidify over time, but they are by no means infection-proof, not to mention that, although I generally stick to primaries only, many of these beers require quite a long time to ferment and thus should be secondaried, whick requires racking (and thus exposing) them fairly young - the big exception being lambic, which specifically should not be secondaried even if fermenting/bulk conditioning for 3 years or longer. Although as mentioned before, lambic is inoculated with pretty much everything, so that one is mainly problematic as a large source of possible infections.

But despite the fact that sours don't deserve unintended infections any more than normal beers IMO, it's unreasonable to own an autosiphon for normal beers, and then one for every single sour I brew. Right now I'd be looking at having to own six, and buying even more every time I decide to brew a new kind. And that's not even taking into account how often these need to be replaced.

But just because I stick with just a couple autosiphons right now doesn't mean I find it to be anywhere near ideal. I would pay a fair chunk of change to have a high quality, durable, and sanitary autosiphon made of stainless and silicone in a heartbeat. If you compare it to buying so many autosiphons as I outlined, just a single one would still be the more sanitary solution, AND wouldn't take long to be the cheaper solution too. In fact, unless you abuse the heck out of the thing, it should be sufficiently durable that, given enough time, it ought to be cheaper than buying - and inevitably replacing, repeatedly - even just 1 or 2 plastic ones.

So yeah... I would much rather own one of these, even at a significantly higher cost, than going with your brilliant idea, TYVM.

weirdboy

Recipes 

That's because the company that designed the autosiphon is a Canadian company. The patents are registered in Canada, and the US and Canada share IP rights across the border thanks to NAFTA, among other agreements.

They print the respective patent numbers on the package, even. Or, at least they used to when I got mine.