I currently use a cooler as my bottling bucket but i just thought it would be easier to bottle strait from my secondary? It has no spigot so i hav to siphon anyway. are there any other advantages? can i just pour/siphon the dextrose/ water into my secondary? i would rather do that bc it is one less thing to sanatize and expose to the open air.
what are the advantages to a bottling bucket?
- Thread starter grrtt78
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homebrewer_99
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You use your secondary for clearing.
When you add corn sugar or malt to bottle condition you have to mix it up.
If you've cleared your beer in the secondary you will re-mix the yeast on the bottom and it becomes cloudy again.
When you add corn sugar or malt to bottle condition you have to mix it up.
If you've cleared your beer in the secondary you will re-mix the yeast on the bottom and it becomes cloudy again.
God Emporer BillyBrew
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You could use carb drops. http://pivo.northernbrewer.com/nbstore/action/search-do?searchTerm=carb+drop
I kind of feel like my bottling bucket keeps me from getting junk in my beer. It's like a one shot thing and you can pay attention to where the bottom of your siphon is while you're moving it into the bucket. then when you start bottling, you don't have to worry about it. I'm down on the floor while bottling, and am not able to pay attention to whether or not I'm picking up trub.
I'd still use the bucket if I were you. Plus carb drops are relatively expensive compared to dissolving corn sugar or DME.
I kind of feel like my bottling bucket keeps me from getting junk in my beer. It's like a one shot thing and you can pay attention to where the bottom of your siphon is while you're moving it into the bucket. then when you start bottling, you don't have to worry about it. I'm down on the floor while bottling, and am not able to pay attention to whether or not I'm picking up trub.
I'd still use the bucket if I were you. Plus carb drops are relatively expensive compared to dissolving corn sugar or DME.
I actually did that once a long time ago.grrtt78 said:
I don't remember the figures but I took the total volume of the corn sugar water mix and divided it by 50 and that's how much I put in each bottle. I used a sanitized eye dropper to put it into the bottles. I then filled the bottles and capped. It worked good and the beer was evenly carbonated throughout the batch. If I remember correctly, I decided it was too much of a pain so I never did it again.
You get your beer off the trub left in the secondary for one thing. Mixing in your dissolved dextrose is much easier that way. As Rich said, adding the priming mixture to each bottle is doable, but it's such a PIA that you'll either stop that process or stop brewing altogether. We're talking about a $8 bucket and one gallon of sanitizing solution. Throw the lid on and shake it up, let it sit for a minute and do it again. A spigot with a 10" piece of hose on it really makes bottling easy.
When you really start brewing back to back batches, you'll find you can combine processes to make better use of a batch of sanitizer. Sometimes I rack and brew, other times it's bottle and rack or bottle and brew. In that way, you're moving sanitizer from one vessel to the next.
When you really start brewing back to back batches, you'll find you can combine processes to make better use of a batch of sanitizer. Sometimes I rack and brew, other times it's bottle and rack or bottle and brew. In that way, you're moving sanitizer from one vessel to the next.
Ivan Lendl
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grrtt78 said:
Yeah you can do that. Ive done it several times. Just pour the sugar solution slowly into the secondary then slowly stir with the racking cane for a few minutes. Youll probably get some trub picked up but its no big deal really. (You wont get any more or less by using a bucket) The only disadvantage is that you must have enough empty space to be able to fit all the sugar and racking cane without it overflowing (which happened to me once and it sucks)
IMHO, stirring in the secondary will reduce any benefit of using a secondary in the first place. I don't even move my secondary for two days prior to racking into the bottling bucket. I get none of the sediment into my bottles.
grnich
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Plus you don't need to buy a bottling bucket. Your primary is your bottling bucket. Just use your racking cane and preferably a bottle wand to fill your bottles.
dantodd
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definitely use the bottle wand. They are a great help for $4.
Cheesefood
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grrtt78 said:
You need to allow air into your bottling bucket, otherwise you're creating a vacuum and you won't have much success bottling. By the time you're bottling, you have alcoholic beer. Much less chance of infection at this point because of the alcohol. Don't worry about air and light. Unless you're letting it sit out for a few hours, it's pretty hardy at this point.
bikebryan
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I'm assuming you are referring to the bottling bucket? If you rack from your secondary to the bottling bucket correctly, you will get very little trub transferred over; if you stir your sugar into the secondary, you will stir up a great deal of sediment into your product.Torben Ulrich said:
The best bet is to carefully rack into the bottling bucket, where you mix the priming sugar into it.
Ivan Lendl
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bikebryan said:
You dont get any trub stirred up if you do it gently and slowly and stay away from the bottom. It doesnt matter anyway because the bottle is a tertiary fermenter. Whatever trub you do get ends up compacted with the yeast after the primer is consumed. Im sure you get some sediment but its negligible. Actually I probably get more sediment when I use a bottling bucket because I get greedy and try to get every last drop from the carboy by tilting it and thereby certainly picking up some trub.
I always use a bottling bucket, but Im just saying you dont neccessarily have too and the results will be similar if not exactly the same. For me its more of a PITA not to use one especially when I dry hop almost every batch.
anojones
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I've always used a secondary and bottling bucket (usually my primary fermenter) in the past- but I'm currently not using either. I primary for a couple of weeks and then bottle directly from the primary using a siphon and bottling wand. I mix one cup corn sugar with enough water to have about 1.25 cups and boil it in the microwave until I have 1 cup of solution which is equivilent to 48 tsp of sugar. I use a syringe (without the needle) and add 3-5 ml of solution to each bottle depending on the carbonation I want (5 ml = 1 tsp). Using the sugas solution is an easy way to measure and get the priming sugar into individual bottles- but you still have to be careful not to double dose them or miss a bottle.
zoebisch01
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Does anyone here use a primary with a bottling spigot? The only two cons to it seem to be that you would need to submerge the spigot area with sanitizer and have it mounted high enough to be over the yeast cake.
dantodd
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The only difference between my primary and bottling bucket is the fermometer the shop plastered on the side of the primary. I do usually use the spigot to transfer. If I just dump the whole brew pot in the primary the spigot is in the trub, if I don't transfer all the trub etc. to primary the spigot is easy to use.
zoebisch01
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dantodd said:
Ok cool. I am tired of messing with siphoning hose and sanitized water fills. The auto-siphon is like $12 or whatever, but I just like the idea of not having to mess with siphoning and canes if I can bypass it. I think I am just going to spend about $7 for both primaries and drill some 1" holes and add spigots about 3" up. The fermentor can be tilted to get any remaining liquid out. I strain my wort and most of the break and hops are usually removed. I thought about a bottling bucket, but other than having to wait for sediment to settle out after stirring in priming solution, I don't see any real advantage over the siphon method because you still have to siphon to the bottling bucket. The 'loudest' part of the operation has been the siphoning. I want to quiet it down. Any other advice on this method?
dantodd
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zoebisch01 said:
I'm not sure what you are asking? If you have a spigot on your fermenter and (optional) bottling bucket there is no siphoning.
I just hook the hose up from one spigot to the other and then tilt the bottling bucket and hold it up a little until the spigot is covered to minimize aeration. Adding the priming sugar to the bucket before transferring the beer also guarantees good mixing. Once the beer is all in the bottling bucket just transfer the end of the hose from the fermenter spigot to your bottling wand and you're all set and ready to bottle.
zoebisch01
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dantodd said:
I guess what I was getting at was if there was anything else I have overlooked. Many of my brews I just let them settle out/clarify in the bottles. 2 weeks in the primary and then into bottles, which depends on the style I have brewed. So I am going from the primary to bottle conditioning, but I want to add spigots to my primaries so that I can perform this function w/o siphoning. I think I am overcomplicating this. I was just wondering how high up on the side of the bucket I should put the spigot.
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