Siphoning issue from secondary

[Flic]

I went to rack my Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale clone from the secondary to my bottling bucket today and ended up having non-stop siphoning issues for the first time ever (I use an auto-siphon). I dry-hopped in the secondary so I put a hop bag over the end of my siphon to prevent the hops (I used pellets) from transferring to the bucket. This worked great a couple weeks ago on a prior IPA but I'm not sure if that caused my problem today. Halfway through, the auto-siphon started pulling air bubbles even though it was fully submerged. It basically came to a stop and I tried to restart and this pumped air through the beer already in the bucket. After several attempts to restart with beer being sprayed about the kitchen , I took off the hop bag and got the siphon going again only to start pulling hops through. At this point, I just gave up and lost nearly 1.5 gallons. I'm hoping I didn't aerate too much in the process. I did manage to get 30 bottles but it was well short of plan. I'm confused as to why the siphon stopped though. There was a good bit of residue in the secondary so I'm not sure if I hit that or the muslin bag caused the problem. Oh well......

 

[ifishsum]

I had the same problem with my auto siphon, with the first batch that I tried dry hopping. I could only keep a siphon going for about 2 minutes after which it would inexplicably stop. Tried the bag filter, same as you describe, took it back off, eventually got a strong siphon that finished. Frustrating, to say the least. Didn't happen with the batch after that, but yesterday it did it again on a batch that had very little trub and no dry hops in it, so I'm at a loss to figure out why. As handy as the auto siphon is, I never had that problem with a simple racking cane and hose and will likely go back to it.

 

[MoRoToRiUm]

The solution I've found with auto-siphon. First, I added longer line so I could keep the feed side well elevated above what I was feeding into. Second, since I use 1/2 tube/siphon and don't have an issue of it getting clogged, filter it on the out take side. This way it keeps siphoning, and it's still filtered.