Bottle wand very slow

[Poddyc]

I'm also fan of Festival kits and dry-hopping. Not, though, a fan of the little nylon muslin type hop-filter bags Festival provide to filter trub/hops when syphoning. But I've found the solution!

I use an auto-syphon to transfer brew from FV into bottling bucket, but the little hop-filter bags used to regularly get so gunked up during transfer that flow rate often slowed to an absolute standstill.

Pressure differential from blocked filters could be so much during transfer as to cause CO2 to come out of solution, breaking vacuum and syphon flow, requiring frequent repriming - and much loss of hair.

Last straw for me was a transfer of Vienna Red Lager which took about a dozen restarts over two hours of syphoning. Nearly resorted to using a jug in a desperate bid to rescue what I thought was a subsequently ruined brew from oxidation. (Brew actually survived - hair did not!)

So, I bought a stainless steel 300 micron mesh hop spider. (Cost £5-£20 depending on size). This investment was, for me, an absolute game changer! Worth every penny in alleviating my usual and regular bottling process stress.

I still dry hop without it. In that any dry hopping cones/pellets are chucked into the FV bucket loose as before. But when racking the final brew into my bottling bucket, I now hook the spider onto the lip of the open FV brew bucket and syphon the settled clear brew from inside the hop spider mesh cylinder.

The large surface area mesh of the spider never blocks, and flow rate of transfer is now much, much faster. I unhook the spider towards the end of the transfer, resting the bottom of it gently onto the sediment as I tilt the FV to allow the syphon to get to the bottom of the clear settled and undisturbed brew.

What was an occasionally challenging process is now reliably straight forward. Racking a 23 litre brew into my bottling bucket now takes me as little as 2 minutes to transfer all but the last 200ml of trub and hops, delivering reliably clear brew into my bottling bucket and minimising the chance of oxidation in the process.

Wish I'd known about such kit and used one years ago. Hopefully paying forward here to help others struggling with same!

 

[Galena]

I noticed on mine that if I twist the pin at the end in 1/4 turns the flow is different when fully depressed, depending on its position.

I'll give that a try next time I bottle

 

[Hop_it]

I have two, one with an internal spring and one without a spring. I much prefer using the one without a spring (which just uses gravity/liquid pressure to close off the flow), and have had no slow filling issues with it. The only problem is that it it does sometimes drip a bit between bottle fills. So, I put some newspaper and a small bowl on the floor to maintain domestic bliss when I'm bottling in the kitchen.
PS - The other advantage of not having a spring to close the valve is that there is less mechanism in the flow path to catch stray bits of hops etc, and you can easily see that it's clean.

 

[Poddyc]

I bottle all my brews on the horizontal surface of the opened door of my dishwasher.

Found it makes for a very convenient easy-clean giant drip tray!

 

[Victor Churchill]

I like the idea of the dishwasher door as a drip-catcher, but my brews live in a different room and I wouldn't be lugging the barrel through from the brewroom to the kitchen...

I too have wondered about the non-linear behaviour of the bottling wand. I have been trying to develop a sense for the sweet spot between 75% and 85% depressed where the flow is best. I'm interested in the idea of snipping off the legs, or removing the spring - I have now got a couple of 'spare' wands so might do some trials.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

interested in the idea of snipping off the legs, or removing the spring

I cut the legs at about the half way point and it worked for me i didn't remove the spring as that would stop the wand doing what its supposed to.

 

[muppix]

Every so often take teh end off and the spring and make sure its all clean and no crap in there.. even if you sanitise it, you will find from time to time some crud / break or hop material can end up in there.

I pretty much take my auto syphon / bottling want fully apart after each session in order to clean out the crap. Following one of those occasions it wouldn't stop properly when reassembled, and it's at this point that I worked out the little spring in the end is in fact conical, and needs to be put in the right way around.

Not sure if that's relevant or helps anybody, but in the spirit of show and tell ...