Guys,
When I first started work in a processing factory years ago one of my first jobs was to transfer pure Hydrogen Peroxide from a 100 litre supply vessel into small buckets that we could tip into the process line. Yeh, we used to rack it through a plastic tube, just like homebrewers do with beer. A single drop of this stuff would burn through your skin in 10 seconds flat, and put a hole through your clothes even faster than that. We had to be good, damn good, or we burnt holes in things, like our fingers!
If you're not racking your beer without splashing or losing a single drop then lift your game!
Start the flow of gently by keeping the fermenter low near the receiving bucket and only use gravity to speed the flow
once you have it all under control and the outlet well covered. Tipping the bucket to make the pool deeper faster helps too.
Good racking is an art that all brewers should learn.
The carb tabs are OK for getting started but once you see how easy bulk priming is you will never go back to the drops.
If you consider that a 4% brew ferments out in, say 5 days, for an ale at 20 deg C, then the 0.2% of carbonation should take 1/20th of this time, being 1/20th of the sugar, so the conclusion is 6 hours. Just rough mind you, but gives you an idea that leaving a primed bucket overnight is probably a bad idea ( contamination issues aside )
Buy a second fermenter for bottling, you can use it as a fermenter OR a bottling bucket. I skimped the extra $ and bought just a bottling bucket, wish I had a fermenter now.
You need to rack BEFORE the primary fermentation ceases. In his book Palmer says to rack when bubbling through the airlock reduces to between 1 and 4 bubbles per minute. Do NOT wait until airlock bubbling ceases to rack to secondary.
My last batch was bubbling nicely at 12 bubbles per minute; then one one day dropped to 6 per minute, next day racked, day AFTER racking still bubbling at e bubble per minute through the airlock. This way the headspace in your secondary gets filled with CO2; and can now sit safely under the airlock for as long as you want.
Of course you need a very good seal to measure the bubbling rate this way. Choosing the time to rack is a judgement skill that can be learned like any other brewing skill, I did.
Having said that, the chances of the surface of the undisturbed brew absorbing enough oxygen to spoil the entire batch is very low, but contamination of the secondary could be a greater concern, hence the desire for a CO2 blanket.
