spliting secondary fermentation

Hey guys I decided to experiment with different dry hoping for my apa.

So i decided to do small batches and split them up into 2 secondary fermenters, and I will dry hop them different when the time comes.

What I did was siphon the beer into one fermenter then I filled up the other...

My question is: should I have used a another bucket to transfer all of my wort off the yeast cake from my primary, then give the wort a good stir , and then transfer to my glass secondarys.

My question is because one of my fermenters is continuously releasing (what looks liek co2 bubbles), like a carbed beer. you can see the bubbles coming to the top. I dont know if its the rise in temperate of 1C between primary temp. and secondary, or infection.... but will this have a different affect of my beers in the final product.

Does it make a difference after primary that one fermenter has wort from the top half of the primary, the other got wort thats from the bottom, and therefore got a little more sediment sucked up...?

here are some pics.. by the way I did mess up on my second syphon and the water flow stopped so i did have to re-start and handled the syphon ends with my hands, it was a panic moment, when the hose comes out spraying,,,you know..... (hope its not contaminated?).

what do you guys do if you split batches after primary?
thanks for the help guys.

I think you'll be fine. There's enough yeast in suspension in beer after primary to continue fermentation. Your pictures look to me like there is fermentation in both secondaries, it's just that one is fuller and the surface area is smaller - which makes it look like more CO2 action. Even if one has a little more yeast in it because it got sucked up from the bottom of the primary, my guess is that over the next couple of weeks you should see both settle out to the same FG. And I wouldn't worry too much about your hands touching the siphon end. Most likely not an issue.

Make sure both secondaries have their airlocks tightly in place and you should notice some activity in both.

I have split batches and do them basically the way you described. I split one into 4, and they all seemed to behave a little differently but turned out fine in the end.

And cool close up photo - the bubbles in the ridged glass for a neat pattern.

thx, whats weird is that i dont notice anything in my airlock. its been a few days, so I will check a gravity reading to see it there is any difference between the two vessels.
my biggest question is, will my beer end up somehow different dues to splitting batches. Im trying out a lot of experiments here, and I would want to keep everything else as close as possible. so that I can tell the difference between batches.

ne way I think I will pick up a small bottling bucket, where I can transfer to next time from my primary, then from there split them into different fermenters.