Beer Forum

How the heck do you rack when you’ve a lot of particulate matter present in the source beer/wort? In these examples, I have had difficulty racking to carboy, racking to keg, or dispensing the beer from keg: You’ve a fruit beer with a lot of cherry/raspberry bits in solution, IIPAs with a shotload of dry hop in the source carboy, Belgian wits with their orange peel/coriander/chamomile present in the source wort.. You get the idea. This material clogs up my siphon, slowing it down or stopping the siphon entirely. If they make their way into the receiving keg, they’ll clog up the dip tube, and beer dispensing slows to a trickle. I love these beer styles, but racking/dispensing issues make brewing them a real pain. Any suggestions?

Cold crash, put a stocking over the end of the syphon, be really careful, pay someone to do it for you, put a stocking over you dip tube(this is assuming you are not filling through the dip tube).

There's a few

I've had that problem with beers that I've dry hopped. To solve it, I sanitize a small piece of a nylon paint strainer and use a zip-tie to attach it to the inlet end of the siphon. It works like a charm.

This is for my cornys -
I use the same steel braid in my cornys that people use in their mash tuns.
I put a ss clamp on one end of the tube and then slide it to the dip tube. I then can freeball hop pellets and cones.
If I doing multiple dry hop additions, I have a second keg with the same setup and then just use co2 to do a closed transfer.

dunleav1 wrote:This is for my cornys -
I use the same steel braid in my cornys that people use in their mash tuns.
I put a ss clamp on one end of the tube and then slide it to the dip tube. I then can freeball hop pellets and cones.
If I doing multiple dry hop additions, I have a second keg with the same setup and then just use co2 to do a closed transfer.

I do something similar though with a surescreen which is smaller. Works like a charm with whole hops (never tried pellets). Works much better than bags or pantyhose.

Do you guys find that using panty hose, paint streiner bag, or ss braids slows the siphon or dispensing way down? I've used the paint streiner bag technique with mixed results. It works great with whole cherries suspended, but terribly with the puree. When siphoning from carboy to keg, the cherry bits all seem to cluster around the tip of the racking cane and bubble feremented beer through the siphon. My concern is that this action oxygenates the beer at the worst possible time.

If you have turbulence around the tip of your cane and it's bubbling up through, it may cause you to lose your siphon if it forms a large bubble in your hose, but won't be oxygenating it as the bubbles are CO2 coming out of solution.

I've had issues with dryhopped beers, and tried mesh bag over the end, but the mesh just glommed up with stuff too. Next time I dry hop I'm doing it in a bag. I've also thought of attaching a sanitized bag on the hose end of my racking cane to catch any bits that go through. It wouldn't keep it from plugging, but if I don't need to worry about the hop bits getting it the bottling bucket, I can wiggle the cane around to dislodge any bits that get hung up on the end, and if they get sucked in, they'll just get caught on the other side.

spiderwrangler wrote:If you have turbulence around the tip of your cane and it's bubbling up through, it may cause you to lose your siphon if it forms a large bubble in your hose, but won't be oxygenating it as the bubbles are CO2 coming out of solution.

I wondered how it could be oxygen if there was no actual air getting in. So oxygenation shouldn't be a concern? I was fighting with my racking cane when I racked my IIPA to the keg. The bag around the tip made it worse. As soon as I took that off I had no more issues.