98EXL said:
no no no, I don't top it off in the primary, that would be silly. I only top it off in the secondary. I don't have a lot of trub getting sucked up...I just don't like the idea of tilting the carboy to get all of the liquid out, so I just add more water initally to give just a little bit of a buffer.
I too fill the 6.5 gallon carboy with somewhere between 5-5.5 gallons...I'm still waiting for a blowoff with 5 gallons in a 6.5 gallon carboy....we'll see whenever that happens.
Either way, this is one of my favorite hobbies to date!
Ok, well I'm not entirely sure I'm understanding your process. I'm not trying to criticize you, just understand what you're doing and why.
As for me and my buddies it goes something like this:
We boil a concentrate of about 3 gal ('cause we need a larger kettle!)
Then we whirlpool that while chilling in icewater.
When it gets down to about 75 deg we siphon off the wort into the bottling bucket, via a strainer funnel and nylon grain bag to remove as much hops (and whatever break we're getting from extract) as possible.
We take a gravity reading on the concentrate and calculate how much to add to hit our target gravity. We add the required water at this time and then check the gravity again.
Then we put the bottling bucket up above the primary fermenter (either a 6.5 or a bucket, depending on what's busy) and open the spigot. If we're using the 6.5 we run it through the strainer funnel again. This causes a lot of aeration, and we haven't bothered shaking or stirring or anything else.
Pitch yeast (if we're not reusing a cake). Wait.
After any substantial fermentation has taken place I wouldn't add water to the beer. In my thinking is that there might be dissovled O2. The exception is the water for dissolving the priming DME in, which gets boiled, thereby removing O2 from solution.
As for tilting the carboy while siphoning, I remember when I was brewing by myself 10 years ago that being fairly precarious since the carboy's going to be up high (above the destination vessel). With three people it's not a prob at all. I've seen some carboy wedges that might help you (although a cut up piece of 2x4 would prolly do the trick just fine).
