Bottling: Siphon or Tap?

Hey, sorry if this has been answered. I read through the beginner guides, and I've read the How to Brew by Palmer. Actually, the latter is why I ask. My bottling bucket has that little valve/tap on the bottom. The Palmer book shows the guy just using the tap to bottle his beer, and using the racking cane in the second picture. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but this suggests to me that the preferred way to bottle is the valve/tap, especially since there's less to sanitize.


Is this correct? My worry would be oxygenating the beer. Thanks

I've bottled with both methods (siphon with bottle filler, or with the spigot) and both methods work fine.

This is the best method by far

That's very helpful LGI, thanks for the link

If you will attach the bottling wand, from a rack & fill kit, to the spigot with a short piece of plastic tubing, you can lock the spigot open and let the check valve in the tip of the bottling wand control the flow of the beer into your bottles.

It really speeds up the process on bottling day.

It's the slickest, ultimate, way to go, next to kegging!

Pogo

I found bottling with a siphon tube quite frustrating...bought a bottling bucket and I use the spigot with a short piece of tube and bottling wand. It's much faster and easier IMO.

Thanks to Revvy's awesome instructions linked above I just bottled my first batch last night. I sanitized all my bottles by filling the bottling bucket with about 2 gallons of sanitizer, then used the bottling wand attached to the spigot with a 2 inch piece of tubing to fill each bottle with sanitizer. I then overturned each full bottle back into the bucket, and after draining the bottle dipped the upper half into the sanitizer in the bucket and placed the bottles upside down onto a pre-sanitized bottom dishwasher rack (bucket was on top of my inverted brew pot with the wand hanging down over the opened dishwasher).

After sanitizing all the bottles I removed the rack full of bottles and placed it on an inverted milk crate covered with a clean towel. A small tupperware container with sanitizer and my bottle caps sat on the opened door. After emptying the bottling bucket then putting the priming sugar solution in, I siphoned my beer from the primary into the bottling bucket, stirred gently with a sanitized paddle, and started filling bottles.

This was very easy to do two-handed - left hand hold bottle to wand, right hand gets clean bottle. When bottle is full (easy to get right amount after practicing with the sanitizer as the wand gives perfect head space), it goes onto clean towel on counter, and right hand starts next bottle as left hand places sanitized cap over filled bottle. Switch hands, get another empty bottle, still lots of time for next bottle to fill. After every 12 bottles stop to use wing capper to tighten caps (have a few extras ready, I messed up 3 or 4 until I got the hang of it). Lather, rinse, repeat.

I filled 12 22 ounce bottles and 28 1/2 12 ounce bottles in about 50 minutes including sanitizing, racking, filling, and capping. Cleanup took longer - that primary bucket was pretty gummed up. The half bottle went into the fridge, so I could taste it this morning - Flat of course, but promising.

Other Revvy tips I'll second - go to Sherwin Williams and get a wallpaper tray for $2.50, makes it much simpler to wash and sanitize the siphon, racking cane, stirring paddle, and any other long stuff. Get a small drilled rubber "cork" and a short piece of right angle tubing to fit inside your spigot so you don't have to tip your bottling bucket as much to get all the beer into bottles - I rested the back edge of the bucket on a folded towel on top of my brewpot, and only left about 1-2 ounces of beer in the bucket. If you go to Agway to get cheap iodophor to use as sanitizer, be sure not to get the product labeled "scrub" - it has detergent so can't be used as a no-rinse sanitizer.

Thanks to all the awesome info on this site, I am now awaiting my first batch of beer that I made myself. I'll start chilling a bottle a week to try in 2 weeks. Hope this is not too long-winded, just put in all I could think of that might be helpful.