First time bottling, potentially disasterous

You think you prepare yourself by running the process in your mind a hundred times and weird things still happen.

Of course, I did the basic sanitizing, the bottling bucket with spigot, the PET bottles and caps, the racking canes and tubing.

I boiled the priming water, mixed in sugar, returned to boil, cooled to 70dF and dumped it into the bucket.

To siphon out of my secondary, I've been using the carboy cap method. The first problem was that there was still a little iodaphor solution in my tubing which I managed to dump on top of my priming sugar solution. At that moment I had to decide if I think it was enough to kill all the yeast in my brew or not. I decided it would probably be OK (maybe 1/2 cup of diluted iodaphor made it in).

The second problem is that my tubing, after soaking in warm sanitizing solution, softened up and was making a horrible seal on my racking canes. Every time I tried starting a siphon, it would suck air at this joint. This continued even after I put a hose clamp on it. Through all this, I ended up blowing into the carboy about 12 times which I feel really opened up a good chance for infection.

Finally, since the flow kept stopping, I never really got a nice swirling in the bucket to mix the sugar in. Hopefully the gentle stirring afterwards will get me to have even carbonation.

I hope batch #2 goes smoother.

You should look into getting an auto-siphon. I used this just the other day when transferring over to my second carboy and had great success with it.

Most auto-siphons will come with an attachment for bottling which makes it relatively easy to bottle with minimal mess (I don't think you will ever avoid all the mess).

It won't kill your yeast. You may get an off flavor, it depends on how much you got in there I guess. Every time I do anything I always leave droplets of the stuff on my equipment, and I've never noticed anything.

I'm not sure about the seal thing. That sounds weird. While an auto-siphon is very nice, it doesn't sound like that will solve your problem. You might need new tubing. How far are you sliding it on there? It should be more than a quarter inch.

It was on all the way to the bend, probably 2". I'm going to grab a few feet of new tubing and give that a shot. I think it was the 10 minute soak in warm water taht expanded the tubing. I should have dipped in icewater to contract it.

nywanna,
I'm tempted to get an autosiphon, but it's most likely the air leak that's killing my siphon, not the method I use to start it. The bottling spigot on my bucket worked just fine once I got my beer in it to begin with.

Bobby