brewing talk: siphoning

so, my friend eric and i are making some amber ale. this was the simplest kit available to us, and since we'd never done it before, we figured it was a good starting point. all the boiling of wort and such went off pretty much without a hitch. we had some beer in a big bucket for like a week, which we then needed to transfer to a glass carboy.

this ended up being, surprisingly, the hardest part.

this may have something to do with the fact that we did it completely wrong. the thing we thought was for filtering sediment was in fact an airlock; this resulted in us having to restart the transfer of beer like ten times, and eventually we thought we were doing something wrong (we were), but the way in which we tried to fix it resulted in worse transfer, and eventually spilling a bunch of beer all over the floor.

protip: if you plan on brewing beer, use the internet to watch someone do it first.