Beer Forum

Last night I bottled my APA. I dumped all the equipment in the sanitizer, ran the bottles through the trusty dishwasher, primed the beer, whipped out my fancy new Blichmann Beer Gun, and promptly ran into problems.

The beer gun's tubing is 1/4". My racking cane is 3/8"! You _*CAN*_*NOT*_ persuade 1/4" tubing to go on a 3/8" tube no matter how you try!

I finagled it; cut a length of the 1/4" tubing, pushed it on the beer gun, and put my 3/8" hose over the whole thing. Praise be to St Gambrinus, it worked.

My question is, WTF was Blichmann thinking when they made this thing? Don't most hobby level brewers use 3/8" tubing? I have never in all my brewing days seen anyone use 1/4"!

My other question is; if you have a Beer Gun and use 3/8" tubing, how do you cope?

Charlie (the APA looks beautiful!)

I assume that the primary purpose for the beer gun is bottling kegged forced carbonated beer. The 1/4 tubing is used to increase resistance to flow and decrease foaming when you are bottling carbonated beer. There would be no need for a racking cane in this case - the 1/4 tubing would be connected directly to a corny liquid out thingy.

I guess that you're using the beer gun to transfer uncarbonated beer into the bottle for bottle conditioning? In that case, I like your solution.

Junket wrote:I assume that the primary purpose for the beer gun is bottling kegged forced carbonated beer. The 1/4 tubing is used to increase resistance to flow and decrease foaming when you are bottling carbonated beer. There would be no need for a racking cane in this case - the 1/4 tubing would be connected directly to a corny liquid out thingy.

I guess that you're using the beer gun to transfer uncarbonated beer into the bottle for bottle conditioning? In that case, I like your solution.

If you're creating a siphon and using the beer gun to transfer uncarbed beer for bottle conditioning, that's sort of like using Big Blue to calculate a tip. You could use one of these http://www.northernbrewer.com/pics/fullsize/tubingClamps.jpg for 45 cents just as effectively. Or you could go crazy and get one of these for 2.95 http://www.northernbrewer.com/pics/fullsize/SpringFiller.jpg

Yeah. As Junket said - the Beer Gun was Blichman's answer to the counter pressure filler - designed to fill bottles with carbonated beer from a keg. You just need to put your primed beer into a bottling bucket, attach a hose to the spigot, and use a conventional, spring loaded bottle filling wand.

Mylo

I got the beer gun because my bottling thingy went south. I thought the CO2 connection was for flushing the bottles with gas before filling them. Duh.

OK. I'm a dumbass. But, the Beer Gun works good for bottling from a primed bucket. Just the weirdness of the hose sizes.

Charlie

Charlie wrote:I got the beer gun because my bottling thingy went south. I thought the CO2 connection was for flushing the bottles with gas before filling them. Duh.

OK. I'm a dumbass. But, the Beer Gun works good for bottling from a primed bucket. Just the weirdness of the hose sizes.

Charlie

The CO2 connection is for pre-purging the bottle. It's a good thing to have around for when you do (eventually) go to kegging exclusively - and you want to enter some comps or give away some homebrew as gifts. But it's just using like using a pneumatic framing gun to build a birdhouse. Bottling bucket with a spigot requires no siphon, and the cheap bottling cane will do an effective job at filling the bottles. My only recommendation is to not start of with too much of a gravity drop - which will mean too much spashing inside the bottle. You can increase the drop at the end when the filling takes longer. Since you are priming and bottle conditioning - the active yeast should take up any residual O2.


Mylo

Did you try and put the end of the hose in boiling water? It works everytime.

ukbrewer wrote:Did you try and put the end of the hose in boiling water? It works everytime.

+1

I just dip pain in the ass hoses in my HLT, which is usually between 170-180... and the hoses submit.