Equipment
Siphons, racking canes, hoses and food-grade tubing
How do I move cider off the lees without a pump, and what tubing is safe?
In short
A siphon works because a continuous column of liquid in a tube, with its outlet below the surface of the source, pulls the rest along behind it. No energy input is needed beyond the height difference.
A racking cane is a rigid tube with a standoff tip at the bottom, which holds the intake a centimetre or two clear of the lees so that the cider is drawn without stirring the sediment up.
The tubing is where the risks are. It must be a food-grade material, it must be sized so flow is gentle, and it must be cleanable — or cheap enough to replace, which is usually the more honest answer.
Racking cleanly
The point of racking is to leave the lees behind, and everything about the technique serves that. The source vessel is moved into position and left to settle again for at least a few hours, because carrying it disturbs the bed. The cane goes in slowly and vertically, and is lowered as the level falls rather than being pushed to the bottom at the start. The receiving vessel sits below, and the outlet is put down to the bottom of it so the cider fills from underneath rather than splashing in.
Starting the siphon should not involve a mouth. Sucking on a racking tube introduces oral bacteria and yeasts into the cider, and it is entirely avoidable: an auto-siphon primes itself with a single pump stroke, a filled tube with a thumb over the end starts a siphon cleanly, and a small hand pump or a squeeze bulb does the same job.
Stop before the lees. The last few centimetres of a vessel contain most of the sediment and comparatively little cider, and pulling that through undoes the whole exercise. Where the volume matters it can be settled separately and the clear portion recovered later.
What tubing to use
Common food-grade tubing materials are silicone, food-grade PVC, polyethylene and various thermoplastic elastomers. All are made in food-contact grades and in industrial grades that look identical, and the industrial grades may contain plasticisers and additives not authorised for food contact. Tubing intended for food use is sold as such, with a declaration of conformity behind it; hose bought from a general hardware supplier is not.
Plasticiser migration is the specific concern with flexible PVC. Some plasticisers are lipophilic and migrate into alcohol-containing liquids more readily than into water, and the migration increases with temperature and contact time. Food-grade formulations are authorised on the basis of migration testing; unspecified hose is not.
Silicone tolerates heat, which is what makes it the usual choice where tubing has to be sanitised with hot water or steam or used on a hot-fill line. It is more permeable to gases than PVC, which is immaterial over a transfer and relevant if tubing is left as a permanent connection.
Bore size matters for the reasons a pump’s suction line does. Too narrow a bore makes a transfer slow and turbulent; too wide a bore in a siphon is difficult to prime and hard to control. Fittings should be smooth-bore and hygienic rather than barbed and jubilee-clipped wherever the cider is finished.
The cleaning problem
Tubing is the worst object in a cider house to clean, because it is long, narrow, flexible and opaque, and because nobody can see inside it. A film of cider left in a hose overnight grows an acetic and lactic population within a day in a warm room, and the next transfer runs the whole batch through it.
The workable practice is to flush immediately with water, then circulate a detergent solution, then rinse, then sanitise, then hang the hose vertically to drain and dry rather than coiling it wet. Coiled wet tubing holds pockets of liquid indefinitely.
Tubing is also cheap relative to a batch of cider. Replacing it on a schedule, and replacing it immediately if it has gone cloudy, stiff, sticky or discoloured inside, is a reasonable policy at any scale and an obvious one at small scale. A hose that has carried a spoiled batch is not worth saving.
Gravity is a feature
Also answered on this page
Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.
- How do you rack cider off the lees?
- What tubing is safe for cider?
- Can I use garden hose for cider?
Related
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- What equipment do i actually need to make cider at home — At kitchen scale, most people start with bought juice and a demijohn, because that removes the two hardest problems — milling and pressing — and leaves the fermentation to be learned on its own.
- Why does everyone say cleaning matters more than anything else — Cleaning removes soil — pomace, lees, tartrate, protein and the biofilm growing in it. Sanitising reduces the number of viable organisms on a surface that is already clean. They are two separate operations and the second does not work without the first.
- How do i sterilise cider bottles — Wash them clean first, then sanitise with a no-rinse sanitiser or a sulphite solution, and fill while still wet with it. Bottles that look clean but have dried deposits inside are the usual source of bottle spoilage.
- What is oxidation in cider
- What is racking in cider making — Racking is siphoning cider off the sediment it has thrown into a clean vessel, leaving the lees behind. It clarifies the cider and, in traditional practice, is also used to slow a ferment by removing yeast with the lees.
- What kind of pump should be used for cider, and can a pump damage it
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.
National Association of Cider Makers
NACM · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
The UK trade association. Useful for industry-agreed definitions and for the voluntary labelling standards its members work to. A trade body has an interest in how its product is described, so CiderHQ cites it for what the industry says about itself rather than for neutral scientific claims.
Cider and perry production technical training material
Peter Mitchell / Cider and Perry Academy · reference work · registered as competent for this subject
Searched again on 2026-08-25 and it remains the one printed source here that a bibliographic check cannot fix, because it is not a published work with an edition. It is course material issued to participants of a training programme, so there is no catalogue record to verify, no ISBN, and no lawful public copy. Its state stays `registered` for that reason rather than through inattention.
Where to go next
- Cider making equipment — The rest of the equipment material, grouped by what each piece is for.
- How cider is made — The methods this equipment exists to carry out.
- Troubleshooting — The faults that are traced back to equipment and to cleaning.