Homebrew mistakes you've gotten away with...

[JackoNZ]

OK some Friday fun. There must be heaps out there to share amongst the community. I'll start:

1) After adding my yeast to the fermenter of a new batch of ESB I noticed the tap was slightly leaking and wouldn't seem to stop. I panicked that I hadn't actually tightened it up properly so lathered up the arm in star san solution and went in elbow deep, only to find the tap was tightened right up!

2) Whilst adding my grains to the pot (BIAB) I put 4 clothes pegs on the rim to stop the voile slipping down. I was almost done with the grain when I clipped one of the pegs and it went straight into the mash and sunk, had 5 minutes of trying to find the bugger only to give up. I was a bit worried I might be leaching plastic into the mash but this was my WnBC winning stout, so obviously not!

C'mon there must be some crackers out there....

[Reviled]

Haha, nice, not too bad overall tho mate, its funny when you are convinced a beer is gonna be crap and then it does so well ;o) One springs to mind right now, allthough I know for a fact there are more

Racked a Porter onto vanilla and bourbon, off of the yeast cake, only for me to find the fermenter had a big hairline crack in it and I was quickly losing precious wort all over the kitchen floor - disaster, what do I do? So I did the only thing I could do, which was dump 22litres back onto a heavily abused yeast cake, without a transfer hose, and then left it for a month... Worried for ages that id stuffed it somehow, but all was well in the end cos I won a silver medal :o)

[denimglen]

"I panicked that I hadn't actually tightened it up properly so lathered up the arm in star san solution and went in elbow deep, only to find the tap was tightened right up! "

Done a similar thing - dropped a bung into the fermenter dove in to get it, didn't bother sanitising myself, was only a kit beer, probably came out better anyway :-P

I have had a few batches in my time get a pellicle and managed to get the fermenter into the fridge then into the keg in time before anything major happened - all turned out good beers.

Can't think of anything major off the top of my head right now but sure I've got some that I've tried hard to forget.

[Reviled]

A pellicle and you still kegged it bro?? haha, mate, id go straight for the sink if I saw that in anything other than a lambicy type beer!

[denimglen]

Hard bro. No point wasting good beer!

The way I see it - at my fridges 8C anything growing in there is gonna be doing it bloody slowly - and is most likely not going to have any effect over the twoish weeks it's in the keg. While I'm not a nazi about sanitiation I reckon my cleaning schedule for my kegs is good enough to hold most tame infections back.

All three of these batches were caught at an early stage of infection, the 'pellicle' just starting to form, and by pellicle I mean a some spots of whitish scum on the beer. Two of these batches I gave a metibisulphite and sorbate treatment before kegging just to be safe.

[JackoNZ]

Oh I forgot to mention the time I was doing a night brew and was siphoning from kettle to fermenter. I brew just outside my front door which is covered and has a light. Got to the end and saw a big fat moth stuck in the bottom of the syphon. So my Munich Dunkel was filtered through that bugger, I have one of those in the fridge for tonight. Wonder if that's what caused the lack of carbonation!

[James P]

The biggest mistake to date would be starting brewing..... but I got away with that.... :)

Beer and poker o'clock!

[warra48]

A couple from my experiences:

1. My gas bottle ran out half way through a boil. Planned to disconnect it and change to the spare bottle. Forgot to turn off the tap on top of the gas bottle. Once I did\sconnected the regulator, the residual gas in the bottle escaped, and was ignited by the hot metal of the burner. Luckily, I had some leather welder's glove on hand, and managed to turn the tap off before a major disaster.

2. Brewing a dunkelweizen. Needed to add some more water from the HLT to bring the mash up to temperature. The hose outlet was sunk in the mash, and as I was merrily stirring away and concentrating on the temperature reading, I forgot the tap of the HLT was still open. Realised something was wrong when the mash started to overflow the mashtun. Managed to salvage a passable brew, but dropped about 10% on my usual efficiency.

[Pilgrim]

One I got away with: Second BIAB brew and I noticed wort dripping, nay running from around the tap. Plastic washer between the flange and the boiler was melting from the heat of the gas burner. Wort was getting rather hot but I managed to give the spanner a quick clean and suffer the hot wort long enough to tighten the nut inside the boiler. Replaced the plastic washer with a red fibre washer before the next brew and made up a small stainless steel deflector to keep the flame away from the tap.

And one I didn't get away with: About 20 years ago I went to a Garage Sale at a commercial premises that was closing down. They had some nice 20 litre plastic containers there which had held Lemon Detergent. I bought one to use as a fermenter, cleaned it thoroughly, including very hot water and it smelled sweet. First and last Lemon Beer I have ever brewed and the only beer I have ever tipped out as undrinkable. I learned the hard way that plastics can absorb odours.

[Fraser Kennedy]

Was meaning to get to the shops on brew day to pick up some S-33 for my batch of Barley wine. Got there 20mins before close at midday only to find out that they had moved location. Plan B? I used a 10g packet of black rock yeast, the sort that comes with kits. The OG of the BW was 1.110, from the outset it looked impossible that a mediocre yeast such as this would tolerate the high alcohol, let alone ferment cleanly and to style. Result: 2 months primary, 1 month secondary. FG 1.013 and the best beer I've ever made. Cheers Luck!! But I'll definitely play it safe and get my yeast a few days earlier next time!! Won me the final competition of the University of Canterbury brew club, and added to my case for successful election later in the night

[Fraser Kennedy]

Also to add. Courtesy of my friend Daniel in the US. Apparently it turned out ok :)

WARNING: When I'm tired and writing about stupid things I've done, I get even more offensive than normal. If you have any emotional attachment to social norms, don't continue for your own safety. I'm serious.
If, in my writing, I come across as an enormously self-centered asshole, sexist, racist, terrorist, Jewish, or any other negative affiliation you can think of, keep in mind that it does not represent my views on the world and is, in fact, just used to exacerbate humor like cancer deflates it from a terminally ill child.

Well damn, so it is my fault. I guess I wouldn't recommend that anyone in the world start to brew their first batch of beer after having stayed up all night trying to figure out next semester's course schedule. But then again, you can't blame me. I'm like a little fat, nerdy kid at Lego Land, except all the Legos are made out of white chocolate.

So I'm really tired this morning. Around 8am I decide that starting to brew my first batch of beer is a brilliant idea. Keep in mind my brain isn't exactly functioning to its full potential (it still isn't). I start off by cleaning a ton of glass bottles and the carboy (big glass jar) that I'm going to be doing all this stuff in. I decide to do this in my bathroom, where there is plenty of space to spray water everywhere. So I do exactly that, and after soaking wooden drawers and plywood walls, I'm finally done. I look around: shit, mom is going to kill me if she sees this. So I find the nearest clean towel and smear it all over the floor, leaving the lovely white towel looking like a dirty imported Vietnamese prostitute. I do a mostly mediocre job, and water stains are visible all over the mirror and walls, as well as some National Geographic magazines stacked neatly by the toilet for some in-shitter reading. Great job Dan! Mom wont notice a thing.

Time to REALLY clean everything. I just spent a good hour trying to force the mold out of bottles, which leads me to think they need to be truly disinfected. I put all the bottles (about 50) in a big bucket, fill it mostly with water, and the rest of it with bleach. I get a nauseating smell of chlorine that could only be recognized by dead World War I soldiers.

Time to boil the malt! I go into the kitchen and turn the stove on high. I put 1.5 gallons of water into an aluminum pot and pour the malt extract into it. I take a quick glance at my "how-to" guide and realize it must boil for 45 minutes. No problem, I'll just go rinse my carboy (big glass jar) and be back with it in 5 minutes (all part of the procedure).

I go downstairs and start pouring out the chlorinated water from the carboy. I begin to rinse it out in order to get all the taste/smell of chlorine out of it. The faucet I'm using to rinse it out is well known for shaking the entire house if shut off too quickly (I kid you not). Anyhow, I've connected a small hose to my faucet in order to be able to easily pour water into carboys or anything else I may need. This, from an engineering/fluid dynamics standpoint, increases the inertia of the water a tiny bit. Well that tiny bit was my fucking "Happy Brewing!" from God himself. Yes, Jesus Christ rigged my faucet by the commandment of God! Anyhow, back to the point. On one occasion no different than the others, I close the faucet rather abruptly. Out of nowhere, the metal hose that connects our water supply to our toilet explodes. The hose is whipping in all directions incredibly fast, spraying gargantuan amounts of water all over the book shelf, the collection of National Geographic magazines including the ones about thirsty Africans, the "How to be a millionaire from real estate" book that my dad gave me (God he's going to kill me when he finds out it's soaked...he told me never to take it into the bathroom :P), the plywood walls, and me. I'm not sure if the whipping tube is made out of shards of steel that will rip my hand off. I decide that, compared to the death I would face from flooding my mother's basement, ripping a hand off is a small price to pay. I reach for the hose. Luckily, it's actually made out of really light metal and not sharp at all. After weakly attempting to switch off the water knob right next to it and injuring my delicate hands in the process, I grab a wrench and slam it into the knob. It turns, and I get the rest of it closed with my bare hands (yeah, be impressed).

I throw my bedsheets over the massive amounts of water to stop it from inundating and ruining everything my family owns. I've finally managed to get the situation under control when I smell lots and lots of malt.

I sprint upstairs past my dad who is yelling to me in Spanish, "The kitchen is completely ruined!". Of course, this brings to mind an image much worse than what was actually there, but for a split second I thought that the malt had exploded, lit on fire, burned my two brothers, boiled our cat alive, and not thrown Butch's (my dog's) stick. When I walk in I'm pleasantly surprised, though the scene is still morbid: life serum (pre-beer) is dripping down the sides of the kitchen stove/counters, the pot is overflowing with what looks like it could have been brewed by the witch who gave that Snow White girl an apple. The malt, which is basically liquid sugar, is burning on the stove, dripping down the sides, and even on the floor of the kitchen.

After many hours of cleaning and swearing, it's 12:23pm (noon). I think I'm going to go to bed now, exhausted and (mostly) defeated. I hope the beer turns out OK, the rest is justified with hilarity.

-Dan

[warra48]

Don't you just love homebrewing as your favourite hobby? LOL. Classic.

[studio1]

First beer I made - I put my gas ring on top of the ceramic stove and a pot on top of that.

Went to use the stovetop the next day and popped the fuse panel - called in the repair man to see find out I had melted all the internal wiring of my cermamic stovetop - heat deflecting from the gas burner. $1000 mistake.
Also took the pot up to the bathroom to chill in the bath. There was filthy black soot all over the pot - and soon enough the carpet, bathroom everything. It was a PITA to get rid of too. Thankfully not too permanent.



Second beer I made - I got a bit smarter and put a concrete paver on my lounge room concrete floor - then proceeded to brew on top of that. Bad mistake - I left a white ring on our lounge concrete floor.

Ever since I have been banished to the garage.