Sixpack

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Used my autosiphon tonight for the first time racking to secondary. Absolutely no problems. Just get one. Mine came in the equipment kit I got from Midwest.

Chillibeerman

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I consider my autosiphon my most important piece of equipment that I own. I broke one once and was so irritated with having to resort to the thumb and water method that I turned around and bought two so that I would have a spare.

I would think the carboy cap would be equally as easy. I own a few carboy caps. My problem is that I have ten or so carboys of different shapes and sizes. My caps do not fit a single one of them. I am not sure if their color is an indication of their size, but mine are all orange.

Kaiser

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No need for that fancy autosiphon thingy. Just start the siphon with the mouth on the turkey baster that you use for sampling anyway. Once it gets flowing remove the turkey baster and put the hose into the carboy or bucket.

Kai

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Brewsmith

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You're not really blowing, just more like creating pressure. Yes, some breath does go in, but once the siphon gets going, non sanitized air is going in as well. I think I can safely say that the likelyhood is very small. I'd be more worried about the sanitation of the vessel the beer is getting transferred into than the air. The beer is already fermented at this point anyways. Plus, if you are really worried about blowing, you can rig it to suck air from the receiving vessel to create the siphon. Walker has some pics of this somewhere.

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Beerhead

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Ok, I racked to my secondary fermenter yesterday, and they sipphoning could not have gone more wrong.

First, when I started my siphon (using the carboy cap method) Air bubbles started to appear where the racking cane and the tubing came in contact. Whatever, no big deal, I pushed the tube down on the cane and that lessened the airbubbles slightly. Yet then even more air started getting in (i forget how) and my siphon stopped. I tried using the carboy method again, but it didn't work, so I unplugged the cap and used my mouth to get the siphon going again, and just threw it back in the carboy. I know that a fairly large amount of air got into the carboy, and I was wondering if there was something I could do about it, thanks.

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RoaringBrewer

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Hopefully you'll be alright because the siphon job you just described didn't sound ideal...

Should have bought the $10 autosiphon...

Yuri_Rage

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Get a Better Bottle with a spigot. Siphoning problems solved.

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Walker

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Read that whole thread... a couple of guys have improvements on my original post that don't require your mouth to touch anything.

One way is to use a pump of some sort (bicycle, vacuum wine sealer, turkey baster) to create the pressure or vacuum needed to get the thing flowing. I'm using an old air-mattress hand pump these days. I did a lot of batches using my mouth and never had an infected batch, so it's pretty safe IMHO.

Or, if you have kegging gear, you can use your CO2 tank to apply the pressure.... which is ideal since you not only avoid the mouth contact, but you also keep air out of the wntire process.

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ryser2k

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I'll give you a hint:

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