Bottling directly from carboy

[mgr_stl]

I have a friend who just brewed his first beer. He has two carboys and zero buckets. Has anyone ever heard of or had success adding the priming solution to carboy 2 then transferring the beer from carboy 1 to carboy 2 and bottling from there by attaching a bottling wand to the tubing?

It sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, but I wanted to check with you all to confirm my reluctance that this could work well.

 

[ol-hazza]

It should work fine, the only difference between syphoning into carboy 2 and into bottles is that the bottles are smaller. So long as he has a bottling wand changing from bottle to bottle shouldn't be a problem.

 

[midfielder5]

it will be fine

 

[BigFloyd]

Lowes has inexpensive 5 gallon food grade white plastic buckets in their paint dept which make excellent bottling buckets. Add a spigot and you're all set.

 

[kpr121]

It'll work for sure, but like ol-hazza said make sure you use a bottling wand or at least an inline valve so you can shut the flow off between bottles. Might want to look at a way to secure the racking cane to the carboy too (in addition to the normal plastic clip), I know when I'm racking if I move the hose around too much it has a tendancy to want to slide around and that could cause loss of siphon once you get to the lower part of the beer.

EDIT: Yea I agree with BigFloyd, if your friend is going to be bottling all his beers it would be wise to 'invest' in a bottling bucket, which can be as cheap as a Lowes/HD food grade bucket and spigot. $10 max.

 

[mgr_stl]

Thanks guys. I'm going to just tell him to buy a bucket.