Bottling Trick

I can’t claim any originality in this idea, I picked it up here.  This is a real back saver, and I thought I would pass it on.

I had been reading a bit on homebrewtalk.com about improving the whole bottling experience and I can report that one little change I made has made a huge difference in how painful (or less painful) bottling day can be.

I bought a bottling valve (plastic valve) at the homebrew store for less than $4, drilled a hole in my bottling bucket and then cut off a 1 inch piece of racking tubing and connected that to my bottling bucket valve, and then on the other side of that tubing I connected my bottling wand.

To use this, I simple rack my beer to the bottling bucket as normal, move the bottling bucked to a high position, open the valve and presto!   As soon as I push up a bottle to the bottling wand, I start filling a bottle.

 

This makes it so much better than fighting a long piece of tubing on top of worrying about the bottom of my auto siphon, and it frees up my hands to work the bottles.