Major Air/Siphon/Bubbles During Bottling?! :(

Hello All,

Just wanted to see what the board thought of the possibility of my pale ale being completely oxidized. Long story short, the majority of the things during the brew process went extremely well until tonight.

Well, during bottling the wand/hose/bucket seemed to get an extreme amount of air in it. I'd fill a few bottles and then the beer would go siphoning back up into the bucket and it would bubble like crazy (almost as hard as if it were boiling). It probably did this about six or seven times So, why do you think this happened and what do you think the chances are that my beer is ruined? How can I prevent this in the future?

Thanks in advance

It's probably just dissolved CO2 in the beer from fermentation. You should be fine.

Thanks Anna's Dad... Any other thoughts?

I'm confused how this happened. You started a siphon, it sucked back into the fermentation bucket (aka, the siphon didn't hold and failed) and you have bubbles as much as a rolling boil? That sounds excessive, unless you're blowing into the end of the siphon tube I've had this happen before also, but not to the extent you're explaining (if you're not exaggerating).

From my understanding it takes a lot of oxygen to actually ruin a beer if this isn't just C02 bubbling out of solution. The only thing you can do is wait and see what happens, as oxygenated off-flavors appear sometime down the road and wouldn't necessarily be immediately apparent after consuming you're first few brews.

I can't see how you have it set up, but you might want to set the fermentation bucket higher up and use a slightly longer hose so gravity keeps the beer down, thus preventing the suck back or just use a bottling bucket.

Might be you dont have a good seal between the racking cane and the hose
Or with auto siphon it might be a bad gasket between the tubes

Or are you maybe using a 1/2" siphon that can be seriously hard to get all the air out of?

Sorry if the post was confusing but I did use a bottling bucket. I had the bucket up on the counter and I was bottling down on the floor. For some reason air was getting caught in the hose and woudnt release any beer in the bottle (just stuck in the hose). Then I would turn off the spigot and the bottling bucket would literally suck air back in and the beer inside would momentarily roll as if it were "boiling." I just want to figure out what went wrong so I can prevent it from happening again in the future

In the future, why not do it this way - its easy and works well:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/bottling-tips-homebrewer-94812/

You do know there's a vent in the spigot to drain your tubing.

Did you have the top of the bucket off or at least not sealed? If you are pulling fluid out of the bucket and the top is sealed the oly way for air to get in is through the spigot.

Closing the spigot will drain the hose of fluid every time
You need a botteling wand so thevalve will be on the other end of the hose

mvcorliss said:

Did you have the top of the bucket off or at least not sealed? If you are pulling fluid out of the bucket and the top is sealed the oly way for air to get in is through the spigot.

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it sounds like this- but you should have something on the end of your line with a check valve in it, you don't want to be using the bottle bucket faucet to control the flow.

spearko520 said:

it sounds like this- but you should have something on the end of your line with a check valve in it, you don't want to be using the bottle bucket faucet to control the flow.

Click to expand...

Yes, unfortunately I did have the top on the bucket sealed. So, do you think without the top on the bucket in the future this will happen again?

Thanks to all

Just make sure the top is not tightly sealed. A little air has to come in as the level lowers during the bottling process.

For me I have 2 buckets one for bottling with no hole in the top and the other is my primary for my wine which has a hole in the top for a bung and an air lock. When I'm not making wine I use that top the hole to transfer my wine/beer in from the back room to the kitchen to bottle. When I get out to the kitchen i remove the airlock and from the bung so then there is air flow. Doing this stops any beer/wine splashing out and allows safe clean bottling

you have to have air entering so you aren't drawing a vacuum. same reason you punch two holes in a can of hi C (if you time travel)

Thanks everyone