Do I need a bottling bucket?

**triangulum33** · 10-25-2009, 06:33 PM

Do I need a bottling bucket, or can I just siphon off the primary or secondary?
I need to be careful of buying to much stuff and drawing attention from SWMBO.

DuffmanAK · 10-25-2009, 06:43 PM

I wouldn't say you *need* one, but man do they make bottling way easier.

webnmar · 10-25-2009, 06:44 PM

You can siphon, but you will need a bottliong wand or something like it to put on the filling end of the siphon. This will help you with flow control, other wise, once the siphon starts, you will have lots of drips and beer lossmoving from bottle to bottle.

Another thought, if you have a primary and secondary pail (sounds like it from your note), leave you wort in the primary longer don't use the secondary, convert your secondary to a bottling bucket and use it.

strangebrew · 10-25-2009, 06:51 PM

I think you might need a bottling bucket. You could drill a hole for a spigot in one of your plastic buckets and then just buy the spigot parts instead of the entire bottling bucket. I have never tried it but I imagine using a siphon with your bottling wand would be a major PITA. I am only for batches in to this hobby so you may want to take my advice with a grain of salt

AirRageous · 10-25-2009, 07:26 PM

I bought a bottling bucket with a spigot a while back but no longer use it now. The spigot is an inch or more off the bottom of the bucket and we have to tilt the bucket about 45 degrees to get the last few bottles filled. That takes a couple of extra hands. I now just use my autosiphon and prop up the opposite side of the bucket only about an inch. The siphon sucks all the beer out and we only lose about half a bottle.

beretta · 10-25-2009, 07:57 PM

triangulum: How are you going to prime your brew? If you use priming tabs you can forego the bottle bucket. However, if you use sugar/dme/wort to prime with, I would say a bottling bucket is amost necessary. You could stir your priming solution right into the primary bucket, but then you would most definately stir up a cloud of trub and yeast that I would prefer not to have in my bottles. (the trub is protein, and make cleaning bottles a pain....)

spaceboi13 · 10-25-2009, 08:41 PM

A bottling bucket makes life much easier. It sucks to lose syphon midway. No pun intended

northernlad · 10-25-2009, 08:55 PM

I bottled my first 3 batches using a siphon and bottling wand. It was indeed a PITA. I recently added a spigot to a bucket and cannot wait to have a steady flow that will not be interrupted by a dropped siphon. I drilled the hole so low I had to cut a part of the inside nut off. test run left about 2oz in the bucket.

**triangulum33** · 10-25-2009, 11:37 PM

Guess I'll be getting a bucket.
Thanks for the replies!

GAbrewer · 10-26-2009, 12:20 AM

They aren't too bad pricewise, about $12 at my LHBS.