Siphon as emergency bottling solution?

[hotspurdotus]

I'm scheduled to bottle a beer in 30 minutes, and just found out the spigot to my bottling bucket has been damaged and is now junk. I'm planning on pitching on to the yeast cake of this beer, so I need to do something with it and would rather just bottle than move to another bucket and bottle at a later date.

I was thinking of using my auto-siphon with the bottling wand as a makeshift solution. If anyone has done this, please let me know how it worked out for you.

Thanks.

 

[bovineblitz]

I use the siphon with the wand as my permanent solution. It works great.

I couldn't stand leaky bucket faucets, bottling is a pain enough as it is.

 

[hotspurdotus]

I use the siphon with the wand as my permanent solution. It works great.

I couldn't stand leaky bucket faucets, bottling is a pain enough as it is.

Thanks for the reassurance. I was going to run a test but I was running short on time and trying to juggle the bottle prep and the brewing for the first time.

Time to start the transfer; happy brewing!

 

[ktblunden]

Should work no differently than using your bottle filler with the bucket spigot. Once you start the siphon it's the same process.

 

[hotspurdotus]

A quick report from my bottling session.

I had a rough start, but eventually the siphon worked well. It took me a while to get a good flow going; there was an air pocket in the tubing for the first half of my bottling session. Finally, I started over and managed to get a good solid flow, and everything went smoothly after that.

I did like being able to move the wand around from bottle to bottle. I started out with too much tubing; after cutting a shorter piece I wished I'd had a little more, as I kept moving the siphon when inserting or removing the wand.

One thing I need is a better clamp solution for holding the siphon in place. The one I have just isn't cutting it for bucket and kettle use.

 

[bovineblitz]

My solution for that is to use a 12oz bottle placed in a heavy glass mug. That way I can put the bottling wand in it at an angle and it holds it in place and doesn't tip it over.