Racking to the carboy!
February 10th, 2009Tonight I transferred my lovely smelling beer in to its secondary fermentation vessel, a 22 gallon food grade plastic carboy with bung and airlock.
The siphoning went well thanks to a tip from a home brew forum of filling the siphon tube with water then submerging the racking cane and allowing the water to pull the beer out of the bucket using simple physics. It worked really well and left me with nothing but trub in the bucket and a full carboy.
From Wikipedia:
In the process of brewing beer, trub (trubaceous matter; rhymes with “pub” in England but with “lube” in the U.S.) refers to the layer of sediment that appears at the bottom of the fermenter after yeast has completed the bulk of the fermentation. It is composed mainly of heavy fats, proteins and inactive yeast.
Side note: I automatically pronounced trub to rhyme with pub and not as “truoobe”
Here’s some pictures of the trub in the bucket after siphoning (unfortunately with a really long siphon hose two people were needed so my photographer was unable to take pictures).
Click the pics for larger views
I filled the air lock with vodka which is a suggestion taken from How to Brew. I used the vodka method because I don’t have any taste safe sanitizer and not wanting to use water just in case of the off chance of it being sucked back in to the carboy and contaminating the beer. I moved the carboy to its new home for the next couple of weeks a.k.a. our hall closet.
Click the pics for larger views
Just a few weeks now and I’ll be ready to bottle.
Excitement level is now steady at 3!