I had it easy compared to you guys; yesterday was bottling day for four gallons of saison. - the culmination of my first foray into real home brewing, after using a Mr. Beer kit one time and then having its fermenter blow out of my pickup bed.
I hooked a cane and bottle filler together, by slipping them into the ends of the vinyl tubing my LHBS sold me along with them... found out that isn't enough for an airtight connection, in spite of what I was told. Also found out generic Scotch-type tape doesn't help the seal much. Eventually, I discovered electrician's tape works fine.
Then I ran into one of the facts of life: when your siphon goes from a small tube to a larger one, you get cavitation. Which is a fancy way of saying my vinyl tubing stayed mostly full of air even with no air leaks, while the beer trickled down one side of it.
Finally I tossed the cane, and stuffed the vinyl tubing directly into the carboy. That worked fairly well, except that the tubing curled around and plastered its end against the side of the carboy. So I had to pull it out and cut an angle on it. That did the job.
But of course, every time I took something apart and put it back together, or lost siphon and had to restart it, I spilled beer. Eventually I started using my (grown) nephew as a siphon pump. He'd pull the spring-loaded end off the bottle filler and slip a piece of tubing onto it, suck on it to start the flow, then remove the tubing and replace the end of the bottle filler.
That worked, except for the amount of beer spilled on the floor in spite of using a large roaster pan to catch it. Not to mention that my nephew wound up about half snockered. He's a lightweight when it comes to drinking, but couldn't bring himself to spit out beer instead of swallowing it. And it's some pretty potent stuff
So I wound up with 35 bottles from four gallons of beer. Could have been a lot worse. But I also found out during all the unintended taste-testing that I front-loaded my hops; I added too many of them at the beginning of the boil and not enough at the end. So my saison is probably going to taste more like an IPA.
And of course the wife was all kinds of help, coming through periodically to make comments like, "
normal people make beer in their barns, not in their wives' kitchens." Totally ignoring the fact that I don't have a barn, and never claimed to be normal. But in the name of peace, I'll probably do the next bottling session at our other house.
Oh well, getting ready to start another batch this coming weekend. I look forward to discovering a whole new list of ways to screw things up....
