Oh you stupid f@€%!

Is what it muttered to myself today as I realized that I had poured 2/3rds of the yeast starter for my Clementine Wit into my Speidel containing my already fermented pumpkin spice ale. What is your best "Oh you stupid f@€% moment?"

Stirring my cooling wort with a glass thermometer (the kind with teeny-tiny metallic beads inside) and being slightly tipsy enough to smash said thermometer against the copper wort cooler, spreading aforementioned metallic beads all throughout the epic imperial stout I had been brewing. Long story short, that brew went down the drain reeeally quick.

Nothing truly epic, but one batch a couple of years ago I reversed the hop schedule by accident. Bittered with Citra, Cascade middle and Chinook finish. It was a cat-pissy piney explosion with a pucker factor of 11 - and that my sons actually loved (gotta be a genetic malfunction from the wife's side there).

If I can keep it to that I'm golden...

Cheers!

Pitching yeast into a flask using a funnel. The funnel had a removable screen. The screen was in the funnel - needless to say, I had to pull the screen and tap it against the funnel to get most of the yeast cells off of it. I'm sure I didn't get all of them in the flask.

Not really epic, but I try to brew stone sober. I'm sure that saves me quite a bit.

Before I switched to all grain, I was doing a partial mash and using the oven to keep the mash warm. I had the pot wrapped in an old towel and forgot to turn off the oven. A few minutes after putting it in, smoke started billowing out of the oven. Yup. Towel caught fire. Saved the beer though.

Kitchen Fire Cream Ale - a one-time only beer.

Made a starter wort. Poured the boiling wort into a flask and pitched the last packet of yeast I had. If that is the worst I do I am in pretty good shape!

So far, siphoned beer into bottling bucket with the spigot opened, racked beer into secondary with the other end of the hose still in a brand new 5 gallon bucket of freshly mixed star san, let a pot tip over in a bucket for a quick moment that had hose water in it (beer was fine), tried to ram 12 oz of toasted coconut sitting in a hop bag through the mouth of a carboy (no, it did not work), used a 4" funnel for pouring wort only to find out said funnel moves, it is too small, and I'm a dummy sometimes, and lastly I racked a gallon of wort over 8-12 oz of star san.

I've been brewing less than a year. I anticipate I will bust something on me or my house before I hit a year of brewing. Clearly I need adult supervision.

A week after I got my first brew in the fermenter, I had a friend over and I was so excited about my new hobby I was showing him all my stuff. While I was explaining the hydrometer to him, I decided to give a demonstration. I was using the tube the hydrometer came in as my sample jar, which was just a plastic tube with push-in caps on both ends. I forgot that the bottom wasn't on all the way and dropped the hydrometer into the tube to show how I measured gravity. It shot straight down through the bottom and smashed on the tile floor.