Worst beer you've made

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My worst one was a St. Peter's golden ale kit.
About the third brew I made. I think I pitched too warm or it got too hot fermenting. Still had a bad taste about 5 months later
 
Thus far I've been lucky but I've only been brewing properly a year. My first kit was a Woodforde's Admiral's Reserve which went into a pressure barrel was a bit odd. I didn't take hydrometer readings as I figured I'd probably just infect my batch or get the bleach powder somewhere it wasn't meant, so I got an oddly sweet beer which made my wife fall over giggling after half a pint... We drank half the barrel which went flat pretty swiftly, but still tasty. Then it got moved to my inlaws for Christmas which stirred up all the sediment and killed what little sparkle it still had. The rest sat for a few months and got binned.

My worst fermented drink was my redcurrant mead. Redcurrants don't taste of much and have a lot of acid in them, when the brew was racked it wasn't nice but had promise if the bitterness mellowed away and the fruit came forward, unfortunately the opposite happened. It smelled awful and tasted worse so went down the drain as I wanted the demijohn and didn't fancy leaving it a year or more to see if it improved. To be honest I've had no luck with cheap supermarket honey, always a bitter aftertaste (could be eucalyptus honey blended in) once fermented so on to some experiments with more expensive varietal honey.
 
MyQul said:
I think the worst I've made is the geordie winter warmer kit. I brewed it too warm so it was fusil city. Still drank it though over the period of about 6 months. A bottle here and a bottle there
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I think they're still using the commodore 64 for label designs.
 
Did a rushed extract witbier last year. Steeped 300g of carapils, then did a boil with 3kg of wheat LME. Hops were saaz to bitter. Bitter orange peel and coriander were added at 15 minutes to go. Screwed the yeast up and got wy3942 instead of wy3944. Had zero head and was way too dark for a witbier.

Never again.
 
about 10 years ago when I was stove top extract brewing and didnt know WTF i was doing.
I tried to do a ( hang head in shame here ) Stella clone and ballsed it up completely, I put hops in for a full 25l boil and of course I was boiling about 10 litres and then topping up with cold water.
The end result was a beer which had absolutely zero bitterness, it was disgusting.
 
My worst was one I made fairly recently it was an all grain kit from a large on line hbs. The description was of an ipa using a single hop that I'd not used before. I remember looking at the dry grain thinking this is a bit dark for an ipa. The thing turned out like a porter, the hop was bad and then it got an infection in the pb. All in all it all went bad. The wrong kit, bad beer and an infection.
 
I've had a few shockers, a breakfast stout with an inexplicable off flavour, a black IPA that tasted like mushrooms (?), but the only one that was bad enough to be undrinkable was a Belgian dubbel a couple of years back which was fermented with a blend of the dregs of a few different commercial Belgian ales. Absolutely terrible, but thankfully it was only a small batch so didn't hurt too much as it went down the drain.

It's all a part of learning though, as some clever bloke once said "the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried".
 
Worst beer I've done would be the 2nd attempt for my Red IPA, I modified the recipe from the 1st batch and essentially over hopped it (85g for 12l) It was so bitter I tried to drink it but was too much so had ditch it.
Another not so great batch was a punk IPA clone, don't really know what went wrong with it, just didn't quite taste the same or what I was expecting.
 
This could prove to be a cathartic thread. I've had a couple of shockers to report myself.

First one was years back when I did kits and had no temperature control. I brewed the St. Peters Ruby Red kit during a June heatwave and the resulting hangovers were the stuff of legend. Must have been ridden with fusel alcohols. I ended up chucking it.

The other one was the only time I brewed AG using our tap water. The result was so heavily phenolic it was just nasty, medicinal, disinfectanty. It had to be binned. Since then it's been bottled water all the way and no product containing chlorine goes anywhere near my brewing kit. I sterilise with good old cheap sodium met.
 
Tough one that as a I've made a fair few over the years.

In the early days when I was a student I made a stout kit, probably Boots, looking back I'm not entirely sure it fermented properly, the end result was very heavy. Still drank it though. A mate described it as diesel oil.

I've also attempted these kits twice http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Brewers_Choice_Brupaks_Beer_Kits.html and each time it hasn't gone well, probably should have learned from the first. Second attempt it stuck and I could get it going again so I put it in the keg in the hopes it would be drinkable, couple of pints in I realised it wasn't, sickly sweet and not nice, poured it away.

Aside from them generally pretty pleased with most stuff I've made. Even the current Coopers kit I'm drinking is growing on me even though it didn't seem great initially.
 
Worst by a country mile is a kit by finlandia their " traditional" beer.... most of it got used in slug traps!
 
shepp said:
Never did well with them, but I fancy giving this a go one day to compare.
http://brulosophy.com/2014/07/21/extract-vs-all-grain-exbeeriment-results/
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This is interesting and probably deserves a thread of its own. I haven't done a side by side comparison, but have done an extract brew and kit brew to clarify in my own mind what is achievable. As I go to two homebrew clubs and was finding giving honest feedback without knowing if Extract/kit twang was a process or ingredient fault, having only really brewed AG.

Sent from my C5303 using Tapatalk
 
A buddy and I used cocoa nibs from a friend's chocolate company to do something tastey, except the nibs made the result intolerably bitter. I am not sure we researched how to get a proper flavour profile and used ingredients which had a cool (personal) connection, but certainly may not have been suitable from a chemistry standpoint.
 
MmmBeer said:
My worst recent beer was a Bulldog Bad Cat kit, which ended up tasting like vomit; butanoic acid I think is the compound in question. Tried drinking two pints, the rest went straight the drain.

I also found about a dozen bottles of beer in my old home brew kit, in my parents attic recently, that I must have made whilst I was at university nearly 30 years ago. It didn't smell that bad, but must have been pretty awful for me not to have drunk it as a student.
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I read somewhere that infecting a butanoic acid beer with brett turns a disgusting beer into a lovely sour one :shock:
 
Worst for me was a Geordie Lager kit I did back in the 70's I think. Didn't have anywhere to put it, so fermented it in the greenhouse. Not a good idea! It tasted somewhere between Sarsons and Jeyes Fluid. The memory's still vivid...:sick:
 
I remember making Cooper's Smoked something or other about 10 years ago. Disgusting. It over carbed, went thin and was just awful. Put me off brewing for a while.
 

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