That's what she said. Seriously, question about siphoning into bottling my bucket. Books and instructions all emphasize siphoning "quietly" to avoid introducing oxygen into wort/beer. However, in my last batch, as I siphoned the beer down closer to the yeast cake, I kept losing the siphon and had to rereprime by pumping my autosiphon (yes i was tilting the carboy to make it deeper where I was siphoning) This caused sputtering/spitting at the tip of the autosiphon and bubbles in the line. As I pumped the autosiphon, it also caused the beer that had already been transfered to bubble as air was pumped through the hose. Concerned with oxidizing the beer, I finally gave up and stopped siphoning, sacrificing a good 2-3 pints from the fermenter that appeared, upon inspection, to be plenty clear of the yeast cake to avoid drawing dormant/dead yeast into the bottle bucket. Now I'm concerned that I have oxidized beer in my bottles and am bummed that I wasted good beer. So for next time, what should I do? Do I keep pumping and sucking away until every last drop of quality-looking beer makes it into the bottling bucket even if there are lots of bubbles and sputtering? Or do I stop siphoning immediately as soon as I lose the siphon and just write off those last couple of beers as a cost of doing business? I should add that I think what may have contributed to the problems was that I had dry hopped, and to filter out the hops, I had zip-tied a hop strainer to the end of my autosiphon.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.