Auto Siphon to Bottle Issues (Dry Hop Pellet Debris)

[aceec]

So it's past due time for me to bottle but I haven't had a chance to get it take care of before tonight this week. Now that I had a few free hours I went to bottle but was having issues that I didn't have the first time around (this is my second brewing experiment).

This is roughly my recipe although I can't find the version I used at the moment: https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/66742/citra-double-ipa

I'm using a 5-gallon glass carboy for my secondary fermentor. I used the below dry hopping schedule but I'm already two days late as of tonight but I'll have to try again tomorrow making me three days late to bottle so I'm concerned about that 12 days now being 15 days.
1 oz Citra 12 days
.5 oz Citra 9 days
.5 oz Citra 6 days
1 oz Citra 3 days.

To dry hop I used pellets and just threw them in loose with the plans to use a couple layers of a grain steeping bag to act as a filter on my auto siphon. The issue I'm having is that it is seeming like no matter how hard I try to work the auto siphon it is bringing in a ton of air with it and the beer in the bottle is ending up really foamy. My last batch I was able to eliminate get it to basically 100% liquid in the tube. After a few beers the problem seems to progressively get worse. I gave it a shot without the steep bag filter on the auto-siphon and it just brought in a ton of sediment with it and immediately clogged up.

Anything that I can do to help get my beer in the bottle in a more efficient manner?

 

[bruce_the_loon]

Auto siphons lend themselves to sucking air because of the inner pumping tube having a rubber seal against the side of the outer tube. No matter how good that seal is, as soon as the vacuum draw exceeds the seal's resistance, it will pull air in past the seal. As the grain bag material starts clogging, the vacuum inside the siphon increases because of gravity and it will pull air.

Solving this is the problem, and my quickest answer is to not use the auto siphon to bottle at all and rather use a solid tube with no potential to draw air. That will slow down though as the bag gets clogged up and isn't really suitable to bottle with.

The better solution would be to rack from the fermentor into a bottling bucket or other vessel and bottle from there. If the intake side of the siphon, whether you use the auto siphon or a solid tube, is held fixed in one position at the bottom of the fermentor, you'll suck a small amount of trub/hop debris and the rest should remain in the fermentor. However, if the hop debris is floating throughout the body of beer, that will get pulled through and then the only solution is to put a filter bag on the siphon.

If you siphon into a bottling bucket, you could put the filter on the outlet side of the siphon and capture the material that way as well. Then you could stop the siphon by kinking the tube, empty the bag and then let it flow if the bag gets too full. This all brings extra risk of oxidation though.

You also only need one layer of filter material, more layers will just increase the resistance to flow and contribute to the vacuum draw problem along with the clogging.

 

[robbeh]

Wow that’s quite the recipe!

Bruce nailed it. I actually ran into this exact problem and couldn’t figure out why it was happening either. By looking at the design I figured it had to be the seal inside the auto siphon but I didn’t realize it was due to it starting to get clogged.

I would definitely invest in a bottling bucket with a bottlin wand. It will make your life ten times easier.

As for the extra days dry hopped, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Theory is dry hopping typically is 3 days but people still dry hop for much longer.

How are you priming your bottles? Batch prime or per bottle?

 

[aceec]

Thanks, I'll see if I can get a bottling bucket but not sure if that'll be an option this time around.

I'm doing a batch prime that is already in the beer now for 24 hours. Could that lead to an issue?

 

[robbeh]

I would not say I am an expert here but I believe that’s somewhat an issue or going to become one.

The sugars and the suspended yeast are going to work and you want to capture that co2 to carbonate your bottles.

If you can I would try and get them in bottles tonight.