Home brew disasters??

Tell us about the time your brew day went wrong. Don't be embarrassed. I think we all must have a story to tell. Maybe then we can all learn from others mistakes ;-)

Pretty elementary error - whilst dipping hydrometer post fermentation - didn't appear totally finished so I thought 'I'll just give it a gentle stir' - snap - broken glass and end of hydrometer in the brew. Whoops

Pedgey said:

Tell us about the time your brew day went wrong. Don't be embarrassed. I think we all must have a story to tell. Maybe then we can all learn from others mistakes ;-)

Click to expand...

So, I had this out of date Coopers Australian Lager (10 years past best by date) and thought I would change the yeast and add some hope. The wort looked and smelled ok and so I boiled 21g of Hersbrucker hop pellets for 20 minutes and added this concoction to the wort. As they had such a low alpha reading 1.5% or thereabouts, I did not think that they would add too much bitterness but maybe some background flavour. At this point and before pitching I should have tasted it but didn't so have no idea if the brew tasted like poison at this stage. This was a mistake because after adding Australian 497 lager yeast and fermenting it both indoors and outdoors (brought it in as it was freezing out) I then added another 21g of the hops as a dry hop. When I tasted this at bottling it is so bitter it tastes like poison and I have no clue to at which stage this horrible taste came into the brew. Was it at the wort only stage which might mean it is off (although it smelt grand at the time), or when I added the boiled hops or after the dry hopping? No clue but I am living it for a few months to see if that taste mellows...if not it is 40 bottles down the drain!

My first brew day doing BIAB was in the middle of the summer. I got cracking early doors and was down to the draining/sparging stage when I realised that (duh duh DUUUUH) I hadn't any way of cooling the wort down to pitching temperature.
This, on its own, isn't completely disastrous. I left my kettle in a sink of cold water (which became hot laughably quickly) and rushed off to my friendly local Morrisons to get ice.
This being summertime, there were only two bags of ice cubes left instore. I panicked and bought a bag of frozen peas as well and sweatily dashed back to my house.
Upon arriving, I realised that I had left the back porch open and several flies were lazily hovering near the open pot--ironically, the heat of the wort put them off having a dip.

I packed the ice into the sink and refilled with water, burning myself on the pot as I pathetically tried to stir water around it. The ice gave up the ghost very quickly and I found myself noticing a new, horrible problem.

Afternoon sunlight was beginning to shine in from the window. The lid of my kettle is Perspex and the bitter, hopped wort could go nowhere else save the sink. What followed was a race against the clock (and season) which involved me dunking the bag of frozen peas into the liquid as a sort of poor-man's heat exchange. The sun was creeping round and threatening to skunk my brew so I tipped the lot into the FV and hid the FV in the downstairs bathroom.

After about a day and a half I finally pitched the yeast and ended up with a decent, but cloudy, i. Pea. a

not so much a brewing error as such

recently sourced co2 in ni

went and signed up
£107 quid lighter as a result


ordered a few corny kegs, regulator , lines, taps, connectors etc


picked up "co2"

never gave it a second thought







then i checked i came home with a tank of Argon



Doh.

When I did my first brew I was very unsure about which water to use. I was too tight to buy bottled water so I decided to remove the chlorine from my tap water by running it through the britta (which took ages) and then boiling it (which also took ages). I then put the 20l stockpot with the water (tightly sealed with lid and cling wrap) outside overnight to cool down, ready to add my beer kit (Coopers Aussie lager) the next day.
The next morning I duly added all the ingredients but when I went outside I discovered the water in the stockpot had gone cloudy overnight!
I was unsure if this water was still fit to use and thought it must have become infected with something somehow so I chucked it on the lawn and topped up my FV straight from the tap (no campden tablets, as I didn't know about that trick).
Everything went well except the beer had a definite medicinal note to it which never went completely away, no matter how long I conditioned for.
I now use 1/2 crushed campden tablet and haven't had any problems.

I get the impression this is going to end up as quite a long thread

Ive actually done this twice: I'm a BIABer and after carefully heating up the water to strike temp and doughing in (pouring in the grain) carefully sirring to making sure there ware no dough balls (clumps of grain), I then realized I hadn't put the mash bag in pot a had to strain all the grain out with a seive and start again

To quote George Bush 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.'"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism#cite_note-WhitehouseArchives_FoolMe-11

I have not posted much to this forum, and I am not in the UK, but this is one of the nicest beer forums I have found.

I hope you enjoy my tale of woe. It is notable for background that I brew all grain in ten gallon+ (really 40ish liters for those on the metric system) and use modified half barrel steel kegs for kettles.

I bought a pump, about 25 L per minute flow rate to assist recirculation and lot wort transfer. On its inaugural session I set the outflow hose on the top of the mash tun with the end pointed into the top to let it circulate. But crucially, without anything to secure it in a fatally flawed assumption that gravity was sufficient. Started without a problem and then stepped inside from my patio brewing area to get another item.

Coming back out a minute later--i now had 25 L of wort on the patio in a massive puddle representing 20 lbs of grain and two hours of work, with a dark brown stream Fuller's London Porter clone adding to it by the second. Massive sad faces. SWMBO "Just how do plan on cleaning this up?".

Me: " With old towels and the hose?"[emoji15]

Streambrewer: you poor sod. That'll teach you for nipping back inside to get another beer while there's work to be done! ;-)

I have also had a siphoning error when brewing my first WOW; was unable to get enough pressure on the hose at first and so gave it an almighty suck (weeey) and, before I could get to the demijohn, ended up with a giant mouthful of unconditioned fruit wine that went out my nose and possibly other orifices. Good job I wasn't driving!

Not mine, but found this on an Aussie brewer's site. Not so much a disaster as just bloody hilarious! 'Cockies', I believe, are cockatoos.

'I just use the dodgy bathroom scales. I weigh myself before, write down my weight and then go downstairs, grab the malt, which I have put into a bucket, half full by eye, maybe have a drink or something to eat, go back upstairs and stand on the scales with the bucket balanced on my head (so I dont throw of the balance). I then write down my new weight and subtract the old weight from this, this gives me the weight of the grain. I repeat this process 5 or 6 times till I get the required quantity.
I have found this method much better than my previous one. I only had envelope scales that measured upto 50g, so I would weigh out 50g of malt, then spread it all out on some graph paper so that no grains were stacked (so the thickness was 1 grain thick) and count the number of squares that 50g of malt took up. Once I knew the area that 50g took up I could multiply out by my required quantity. I found that my driveway was the only area large enough to spread out my 5kg of grain spread to 1 grain thickness, so on it I marked out a 5cm grid (3g accuracy!). It was then a matter of spreading out the malt until enough squares in the grid were filled. It was quite a simple method but I had to find another way because a flock of cockies started hanging out in the trees near the house and would descend on the spread out grain while I was carefully eyeing along the ground to make sure the layer was only one grain thick. So I started doing it at night, but the cockies still came but they couldnt see in the dark, so now Im missing the top of my left ear and my right '

We moved to our present place about 20 years ago. When we moved in we had the water tested - it's spring water, straight off the mountain behind our house. The results were that it was totally unfit to drink, being basically diluted sheep ****. Well we've been drinking it ever since with no problems, but... a few years ago I was tempted to start homebrewing again. A mate had offered me a slightly out of date 2 can kit of something or other, so I bought a new packet of yeast and made it up as per instructions. It took about 3 weeks to `ferment' if that is the word, and I ended up with 5 gallons of snotty jelly with green streamers of `seaweed' in it. :lol:
So now I boil everything and haven't had a bad brew since. Lesson learned.

I did the Tough Guy race at the weekend (ended up getting hypothermic at the end and think I may have pooed myself) and there were a load of big water butts knocking around in the communal areas. I decided to liberate an empty one as it was 19 litres and would make a decent extra FV for some of my short-brewed beer. I cleaned it out, bleached the inside and used an extra long demijohn cleaner to get at all of the nasty bits on the inside.

I then filled it with water to rinse it out and saw, with a trill of horrified laughter, a big crack on the bottom of the water butt which slightly soapy water was steadily leaking through...

Kegged my first brew, a Wherry, a few weeks back. All was going well, was having the odd tester pint here and there and was starting to be lovely (On the advice to release the build up of pressure)

Well I ended up with the flu for over a week, so didn't touch the barrel. Woke up one morning to find it had leaked everywhere, lost half the brew and when I went to tighten the tap....the thread snapped! :O

So I ended up having a couple of pints of under conditioned wherry, lost half of it, and tried to drink the rest but was so cloudy it didn't go down too well. The old man didn't approve either, not that it stopped us doing a few pints first.

Now have a new barrel, a new Wherry kit and a brew day coming up on Saturday. Any ideas on a new tap for the old barrel??