So where's my award, Squid?

[kiya]

Whitney racks the cyser off its sediment, ponders writing a paean of praise to an autosiphon in her lj.
Tesla says "I feel like I should give you some kind of award for writing that sentence."
I say ". . . why?"
Tesla says "It's euphonious and pleasantly surreal. I think it's the juxtaposition of 'paean' and 'autosiphon'."

So anyway. I racked the big jug of cyser today. It had accumulated a fingerjoint depth of sediment at the bottom of the jug, and I've found that racking has helped with clearing in the past, possibly by chucking the old sediment so that it needs to find new sediment to feel at home. So I hefted the full jug up onto a chair last night and gave it a night's sleep and a round tuit to settle.

In order to rack stuff off its lees, one needs a siphon; pouring out the jug tends to stir up the sediment and is thus less than effectual. It's also useful to have something called a racking tube -- a bit of straight tubing with a right-angle bend at the top, with a sort of plug on the bottom such that it only draws fluid from about a finger-joint up. (Why this is useful shall be deemed obvious.)

When I first did this, I had a racking tube and the bit of tubing. The problem was that I couldn't suck-start the siphon well enough to deal with the fact that there was a diameter differential between the racking tube and the tubing; since the tubing has to fit over the right-angle-bend-bit of the racking tube, the differential was a touch inevitable. The whole process was a two-person job, especially since eventually we gave up on the racking tube and just used the tubing, which meant one person managing the end in the bottle on the top, and the other occasionally needing to restart the siphon. This is not a terrible fate, mind, but it does make the racking a rather complicated process.

So when we went to the hobby shop to get bottles to put this stuff in when it's done, Kevin convinced me to get an autosiphon. (We also got a lot of corks, and some sealing wax. I need to find something to melt the wax in so I can finish off the bottle of metheglyn for Shane. Unfortunately, I don't have any random coffee cans. Maybe Mom does; I'll ask her when I write back to her.)

Since I have asked you all to imagine a racking tube above, it should not be difficult to imagine an autosiphon. Start out by imagining a racking tube. (Fairly straightforward.) Now replace the plug on the end with a round disk, sort of rubbery, and encase the entire thing in a cylindrical tube in which that rubbery disk can slide up and down and still feel that it's making a roughly airtight seal. The right angle bend portion emerges from the top of the cylinder, like a handle. The plug is affixed to the other end of the cylinder, and can be removed if one doesn't have sediment to deal with.

One inserts the autosiphon in the big jug. It floats a bit. One affixes the bit of tubing to the end of the right angle bend, just like a racking tube, and places the other end in the other jug. And with a vigorous couple of pumps of the racking tube up and down in the cylinder, viola! Fluid is flowing merrily down the tube. Occasionally it needs to be pumped again; the rest of the time one can amiably putter about doing things like reading usenet and commenting on composing paeans to autosiphons in tinyfugue windows. Since I'm putting stuff from one five-gallon carboy into another five-gallon carboy, I'm not deeply concerned about the potential for it overflowing.

And it's a neat toy.

In other winemaking news, the rose wine is bubbling away quite merrily and putting CO2 and aromatics out through the S-shaped fermentation lock. Since it was close to still when I put it in there, I'm sort of amused, though I mostly don't sit and watch it bubble anymore.

Of course, now I need to clean out the gunk in the bottom of the five-gallon jug. . . .