Transfer wort to glass primary

So here is my idea for how to do this:

I am going to use a glass primary for a sour beer that I am making but I am having a hard time figuring out how to get the hops and stuff out of the wort. I am thinking that I will strain the cooled wort to a sanitised plastic bucket (to add air as well) and then pour from there into the glass carboy (adding more air), then pitch my yeast. Does this sound like a good idea?

How do you do it?

I've done that a number of times, but instead of going to the bucket, I pour through a sanitized strainer which sits in a funnel and goes directly into the carboy

With a sour, your concerns about oxygen are going to be a little bit different, but either an autosiphon or a racking cane is pretty much essential equipment for brewing. The autosiphon is one of the best things I've bought in the course of my very expensive relationship with brewing.

I have an autosiphon, the only problem that I see with it is the lack of oxygen getting into the wort. I use it mostly to actually keep oxygen out of my finished beer during bottling or transfer to secondary.

Why is my concern about oxygen different for a sour?

I was thinking about going directly to the carboy through the funnel and strainer but I have a feeling that the strainer will get clogged with all of the stuff from the wort like hops. @KevyWevy do you have a problem with clogging at all and if so how do you get around it?

Funnel filters/screens are a pain in the ass. I have a nice big plastic funnel with a screen in the bottom (bought from the local HBS) but I found myself getting aggrivated because the screen would clog, I would have to set the kettle down, clean the screen, spray with starsan, replace, and I went through this several times when trying to pour out 5 gallons.

Do you use muslin bags for your hops? That has helped cut down on the amount of gunk that ends up in the bottom of the carboy.

The solution I ended up with - using Irish Moss or Whirlfloc in the boil, giving it a good "spin" during the cold break, gunk settles to bottom of the kettle, pour gently/slowly into the carboy (no screen on the funnel).

My understanding with sours is that you want to pitch your lacto/brett after the yeast has had a chance to eat the fermentables, then put the "bugs" to work on the sugars that the yeast can't eat. You could always rack to a secondary using an autosiphon, having a cleaner wort for the long ferment on the bacteria. (It's just a thought).

I suppose YMMV if you're using a blend like the Wyeast Roselare, where you're pitching everything at once. (so yeah, take my opinion with a few grains of salt)

I've been hatching a plot for doing a sour ale so I've been reading up on it a bit, asking at the HBS, etc.

I have thought about using bags but I use pellets which just disintegrate and I am not sure how effective muslin bags would be at that point. I would switch to plugs but they are very hard for me to find. I do however use irish moss for all of my brewing and the stuff does generally to the bottom during the cold break, so I do suppose if I pour it slowly I should be able to get at the least the gunk to settle out a bit and pour off the top leaving the gunk at least until the end when I honestly couldn't care less if it clogs. I will try this approach at first and post the results.

Yea, the sour bear I am doing is a white labs Belgian sour mix which contains a mix of the Brett yeast and the lacto bacteria etc. I found this to be the easiest and least time consuming since I am introducing the souring agents very early on. Also it says sour mix right on the container so I figured it would be the easiest way of trying out the style to start. If I really like it I will go the much harder route of introducing it after a few days etc. or directly into the secondary. This does however mean that I do need oxygen in the primary and I don't have a stone yet, and those are fairly expensive and more stuff for me to have and I have a huge funnel and the sive insert here around doing almost nothing. I was actually wondering why it came with my original kit in the first place.

Thanks for all the ideas, I will post how it goes next week!

If you have a chance to pick up a few muslin bags, they do help a bit as long as you don't squeeze them too much I've done a couple batches using hop pellets in the bag vs. no bags and they do cut down a wee bit on the amount of gunk.

Good luck. I guess we'll have to wait a year to hear how the brew turns out

I'm a bit late to this party, but any of the options sound fine. In my pre-O2 days, I used to siphon into the carboy and then shake it to aerate. Others prefer to pour. Both accomplish pretty much the same thing, so it's just a question of what seems mechanically easier to you.

As for the oxygen in sours, this thread describes a few of the considerations. For what you are doing here, though, I would just stick to standard practices. If you decide that you like sours and want to investigate further, there's a whole new world of reading ahead of you

I boil in a 10 gallon Megapot and primary in a Better Bottle. I whirlpool and let sit for a while, then use my autosiphon to transfer until I start pulling up cloudy wort. At this point there isn't much left in the pot and it can easily be lifted, so I place my large funnel with screen into the mouth of the carboy, put a sanitized (boiled) grain bag or paint strainer into the funnel with the excess material folded over the outside of the funnel (clamp it to the top of the funnel if you want) and then pour the wort into the funnel. A few times during the pour I need to use a spoon to scrape the pellet hop residue to the side, but I can always easily keep it from clogging. My main object is not to keep the trub out of the carboy, but just to filter out the hop particles.
If you hold or clamp the end of your siphon tube near the top of the carboy, the falling stream of wort will carry quite a bit of oxygen into the wort at the bottom.

So I have to say, I think the bottling bucket worked out quite well. For one thing, even with the stick in the wort in the brew pot I managed to short the amount of wort produced by almost a gallon and alas, the glass primary doesn't have any gallon marks on it so I needed something to tell me how much wort I was actually going to ferment. Also I realised that I would have to fill the bucket anyway to sanitize all of my stuff like the wort chiller, sive, air locks, etc...

Also, the mesh on the funnel was much smaller than the mesh on the sive I used, I had about a gallon or so in the pot and it started to clog up. I took out the screen and it was fine, some stuff got in but what can ya do? Most of the trub though was taken out of the wort through straining it the first time. I know that the auto siphon would have clogged up more than was reasonable given the fact that I used spices in it and there was a lot of hops that I strained out.

Over all, I think I will pour the wort into the sanatized bucket through the strainer to aerate it and remove most of the trub. Then pour it through the funnel without the screen in it. Doing it with this method and 1L of yeast starter caused almost instant bubbling in the airlock and within 24h I had about a 1in layer of krausen. The yeast I am using (Brett L.) is very slow to ferment so even after 5 days I am still getting vigorous bubbling. As Martha Stuart would say "It's a good thing."

Thanks for all of your comments and suggestions. I might try out a different way of doing it but for now this process seems to work and I need to sanitize the bucket anyway. Also I was surprised and happy to see that manoeuvring the bucket was fairly straight forward, I was really afraid that I would not be able to lift it and pour into the funnel and get wort all over my floor. It was actually really simple with the handle. I think once I remove the clogging screen from the equation it will be about 30 seconds of pouring without fear that it will overflow.

To others as a finial note, if you do it this way, make sure that you are comfortable lifting the bucket with 5g or 5.5g of liquid in it and be comfortable moving it around. I could see that doing 10g this way I would have to auto siphon first and once it got down a gallon or so run it through the strainer etc. Lifting 35 pounds of sloshing liquid and pouring it out was fairly nerve wracking but it's not that heavy for very long.