Air in racking line...

[RidingDonkeys]

I'm a new brewer, sort of. I've done about 20 batches thus far. I'm posting this in bottling/kegging, but it hapened twice tonight. Once when transferring to a keg, once when transferring to secondary.

During the transfer from my spigot, I started to get air in the line. On the keg, it ended in the line completely clogging with about 4.8 gallons filled. I hate wasted beer, but my options were to call it quits or risk contaminating the whole batch, so I called it. Then, it happened again while transferring the next batch to the secondary. I used the same tubing to transfer two more batches after this without any problems.

My concern is that this will oxidize the beer. My other concern is how to prevent this from from happening in the future. Anybody ever run into this?



Pardon the view. Even though I rotated it, photophuckit is still showing it sideways.

 

[geosteve]

I had this happen, too and figured out my hoses were just not airtight on my racking cane/filler. I shoved them on tighter and continued. I just consumed the batch fast and didn't have any problems with off flavors due to oxidation as far as I could tell. Its funny though... I didn't encounter this problem until my 20th to 30th batch either. Probably a combination of complacency and the end of the tube getting stretched out a bit... I say replace the tubing soonish.

 

[BBL_Brewer]

Could be your spigots too. The can be a little finicky. If you don't have them in the perfect position, sometimes they'll suck air.

 

[RidingDonkeys]

I definitely narrowed it down to trub clogging up the spout. So now I have to wonder how to clear it if it happens again mid-fill.

 

[907_fellow]

My auto-siphon has started doing this a lil bit. It seems like the rubber seal on the racking cane that slides into the larger outer plastic tube might be calling it quits. Just a lil but of air is getting by right now but I may need to buy another auto-siphon soon.