orangehero said:
https://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.
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.
