What are some of the mistakes you made...where your beer still turned out great!

I am not one of the big dogs, but I will throw my 2 cents in

I forget additions all the time and just recently made an entire batch of beer with cascade instead of crystal (I am not sure how it turned out yet, but I am sure it's fine), but probably my most problematic batch was when I made "hobgoblin" and accidentally got dark DME instead of light, and bought chocolate rye instead of chocolate malt. I then had to try and crush the rye with a rolling pin since the local joint didn't have any way to crush it.

The batch turned out great.

My worst mistake ever was right at pitching time, when I knocked over a White Labs yeast vial (yeah, no starter for this brew) and poured it all out onto my countertop.

Hmm. No other yeast in the house. Saturday evening, so LHBS is closed until Monday. Do I leave my wort sitting around for two days? Nah...

I can't remember when I last cleaned the countertop, but at least judging by a quick eyeball check all I can see is a bunch of breadcrumbs. So I scrape up as much of the spilled yeast as I can (using the side of a knife to slide it onto a thin sheet of metal), then go ahead and pitch it.

I lost so much yeast in the process, I underpitched by a ridiculous amount, and I guarantee I picked up some wild nasties from the breadcrumbs.

But the brew turned out fine. A little slow to start, but it was done fermenting within a week, and came out perfectly clear and clean with no off flavors.

Most of my other mistakes have been failing to follow recipes correctly:

My first brew ever, I picked a recipe that called for honey malt. "What's that?" I asked the friendly supplier in my LHBS. "Oh, that just means regular honey. 'Malt' is used as a generic term for any kind of fermentable stuff" he replies. So in goes a pound of honey. Later on I learn that he was completely wrong, and honey malt is of course a kind of specialty malt. But in retrospect this was actually a good thing, since real honey malt wouldn't have worked for me as I didn't know how to mash it. I also later found a different LHBS with more knowledgeable staff

Another time I was doing a partial mash using first wort hopping. But I forgot I was first wort hopping, and for some reason decided to recirculate a huge amount of wort back through my grain bed by pouring it back out of the brew kettle into the mash tun (this was only my second partial mash, so I hadn't quite got my technique down). Of course this ended up with all my hops mixed in with the grain. Inexplicably, it didn't occur to me that I needed to get them back into the kettle, so I ended up with almost no hopping at all. This was an English brown with half a pound of molasses. After 3+3 weeks in primary and bottle, it was so bland as to be undrinkable: overly sweet, but lacking any kind of flavor whatsoever. So I left it and moved onto the next brew. A year later, it tasted great. Still a little on the sweet side, but it developed a wonderful complexity, with a kind of raisiny liquorice character that must have originated with the molasses.

Borisbbadd said:

Wife went to answer her cell phone, hit my arm, her phone flew out of her hand, did a couple back flips and a perfect 10 into the open fermenter..........batch turned out great, but the phone died.

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"Dear, my fermenter is ringing. I think it's for you." ROFL!

alpo said:

This is not a mistake with the beer itself, but I once turned on the valve to my wort chiller with the output hose pointing right at my foot and I was wearing flip flops. That sucked

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I did the same thing with a shoe on. Don't do it either way. Second degree burns aren't fun.

That brew day was the "El Segundo Grado" wit in my dropdown. One of the best I've done.

My worst so far is adding too much top-off water to a cherry stout - ended up with about a 6.5 gal batch instead of 5.5 gal. Watery OG combined with the 1.020 curse and I ended up with a "stout" about 3% abv. The hydro sample from bottling day tasted like crap - too sweet, and very chemically from the cherry extract - imagine Robitussin mixed with dark LME. Spent two weeks trying to think of people I didn't like to give it away to.

During those two weeks it got a lot better. Very good after two more weeks. Now, everyone I've served it to raves about it, and so what if it is only 3%? It makes a great session beer...

I did my first batch of beer from a Best Brewer's American Pale Ale kit two months ago. Steeped my grains at 100 degrees for twenty minutes, then rocketed up to 185 for twenty minutes, cooled it down and added my extract. Added both cans, then I forgot to stir it in to avoid carmelization, so it sat on the bottom until the boil was done. Had three boilovers because my turkey fryer is hot *&^( Kept the boil covered with a lid the entire time. A pinecone fell in about the middle of the boil. Pitched yeast without rehydrating. Racked to primary after 3 days, moved to keg after 6 days in secondary. Went and bought a cool kegging setup and a minifrige off craigslist, and kept freezing my keg/room temping because the temperature control is busted. I've now varied the keg between room temp and a solid block of ice 4 times, and I'm buying a better frige this weekend. The darndest thing is, the beer tasted like dirty behind two weeks after I brewed it, two weeks after that it was barely drinkable, and I swear I had one last night that was pretty decent!
Just brewed an Oktoberfest kit with a full boil that went MUCH smoother, but I learned a lot from my first mistakes, so I'm hoping it will turn out even better (if I can stop making beercicles out of my keg).

I am by no means one of the "big boys".

That said, my very first brew was (supposed to be) an extract amber. 2 gallon batch split between 2 1-gallon carboys. After pitching the yeast, I had the "brilliant" notion to toss in a 1/2 cup of whole coffee beans. Without sanitizing. With all the sanitizing that I was doing, it never occurred to me that I should sanitize the coffee beans before adding them to the carboy. The first bottle had a nice coffee flavor to it, not too strong, but nice.


The rest of them tasted like vomit.

I manage with only a 12 quart boil kettle, so I usually start by 3 gallon boil pretty close to the top...The second time I did a partial mash Dead Guy clone, I overshot my sparge water by about a quart. I couldn't bear to throw it out so I thought I'd just wait until I boiled off about a quart, then add it back in. Aces, right? Except that I forgot that I needed that extra space in the kettle when I dumped in 6.5 lbs of LME in the last 10 minutes. So now with my tub of LME in one hand and spatula/spoon in the other, my wort started overflowing the kettle and burning onto the still hot stovetop (gas was off though). Doh! I had to dip out over a quart to get it back down to a safe level to continue the boil and it was still pretty full.

I actually just boiled that extra quart and a half seperately (just long enough to pasteurize it) and then cooled it and added it to the fermenter with the cooled wort and top-off water. The beer still turned out great, cleaning the stove top was a PITA though.

Lost o-ring and fished around bare arm to get it back.

Left lid off bucket when phone rang, My bulldog drenk from the bucket- The absolute best beer I have made.

Forgot to add whirlflock, just let it sit an extra bit, clear as a bell.

On my 2nd or 3rd brew I was siphoning from the BK to my Primary, got a mouth full of wort and spit it back back into the BK. Beer turned out fine.

Thought I would take a little 15 min power nap while boiling once and wound up sleeping for an hour. Boiled down a little far and messed up my hop additions, but it still turned out fine.

I've missed my mash temperature and had to heat it up and cool it down mulitple times. the mash turned out to be thin, but still made a good beer. Enzymes were confused though.

I had the screen come out from the bottom of my mash bucket, causing it to completely clog during sparging, ended up having to rip my screen door off and use it as a filter to get her flowing again, don't know how she will turn out, bottling tomorrow...

I knocked my manifold apart while brewing. I had to dump all the grain and water into a bucket, fix it, dump it back into the mash tun, and then run off. Talk about potential hot side aeration! It came out just fine though.

I was using a hair brush in the bathroom underneath my carboy to tilt it as I racked it into the bottling bucket...forgot to move the bucket away first, and when I picked up the carboy, the brush fell right in. No infection, but wouldn't recommend as standard practice.

1st kegged beer stripped all the flavor out of a blue moon clone by pumping, shaking and releasing all the c02. lost that one!

1st all grain i mashed unmilled grain

stuck mash on a hefe. ran and got my neigbor to hold up my five gallon cooler over the kettle while i held a grain bag to get my wort drained. good beer.

3rd batch ever brewed i was positive it was ruined. posted multiple threads on how i messed it up. awesome extract summit ipa.

i'm sure many other random things. now i know it's almost always going to turn out good. unless i don't like the recipe, then i just send 1/2 gallon growlers to my neighbor to help finish it off. he loves me, not like guy on guy action.

None of my brews ever goes according to plan but so far i have never had a dud, some of them needed more bottle time and one is overgassed but they are all drinkable.

Zordok said:

My worst so far is adding too much top-off water to a cherry stout - ended up with about a 6.5 gal batch instead of 5.5 gal. Watery OG combined with the 1.020 curse and I ended up with a "stout" about 3% abv.

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I did almost the same thing the first time I used a kit from Midwest, before I realized they meant 5 US gallons (19L), and not the 5 Imperial gallons (23L) that Coopers kits use. It was a coffee stout and even though it was a lower than planned ABV (3.75%), it was still surprisingly full-bodied and creamy and is probably the best beers I've brewed. I'll have to try it again with the correct volume one of these days.

Back when I was using Iodophor to sanitize I made a solution in the carboy that I was racking to to sanitize it. Maybe a quart, maybe even a half gallon of that copper liquid in the bottom of the carboy.

I couldn't figure out why I was running out of space in the carboy so fast until I realized that I never dumped the sanitizer.

Beer turned out drinkable.

jasper9 said:

as a noob i need to step in here. there was a time before Charlie Papazian ?!?!

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We don't talk about it much. It is called "The Before Time"

dontman said:

We don't talk about it much. It is called "The Before Time"

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Or Maybe Prohibition?

I had some ants get in one batch. I called them the "proteins". Mmm good.

PUD said:

1st all grain i mashed unmilled grain

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Oh, man. lol

I have left a wheat beer in primary, on the yeast for two months before bottling, it's excellent. (Usually I hear the stereotype that wheat beer is to be enjoyed young, and not to leave any beer on the yeast for much beyond primary fermentation).

I have left a fermenter overnight to cool before pitching. Mmmm, yummy!

Almost every time I bottle, I've had to stir in the priming sugar, rather than racking on top of it. Never had a problem at all!

had a nightmare of a first partial mash, clogged my braid, tried to stir the grain off it and broke my braid stuck my arms in it. so i tea bagged 10 pounds of grain the remained of my wort. was so frustrated i put down all my equipment on the garage floor, stirring spoons, grain bags everything, not even on a towel, dirty cold cement. stupid electric turkey pot couldnt hardly boil the wort, i had it uncovered exposed to outside air for nearly an hour.

then, when i cooled it witha wort chiller (home made its super easy and works!) left it exposed for anther 20min while it got to room temp. forgot to aerate it well, but the pouring action into my carboy was probably enough.

the temp stayed at a good 60 degrees in fermentation, but it got really cold one night so i put an electric blanket near it, the next morining it was up to 78, this is my hybrid stout i posted a bit back btw.

used a butt load of black patent and left the grain bag in for nearly an hour, forgot about it, its pitch black, pretty awesome though. dry hopped in primary lol. my one way valve leaked water down into the beer during fermentation

after all that i just racked it to secondary after 15 days. Tasted AMAZING, glorious chocolate and coffee well balanced up front, hops in the background, black like jet fuel, thick as swamp mud, was 10.5% abv going into secondary. This thing is a mouthful.

going to have a hard time leaving it in secondary for any long stretch or bottle wise.

I guess my mix up of ordering milled All Grain my first time buying ingredients was prolly a bad idea. Forced me to go AG tho. 1 PM batch that came with the kit, rest have all been AG.

All my insignificant screw-ups have come from the need to drink copious amounts of booze during brew days. My brews days include up to 5 batches, I dont get to brew that often, so I have up to three batches going at one time. 1 mashing, 1 heating mash water & 1 on the boil. Makes for some interesting juggling on brew days. Brew days sometimes start at 0600 and have been known to last till after 2200 at night.

I guess not a mess up, but funny.. My best favorite hound dog "marked" my banjo burner the first time I had it on the deck. He wasn't hurt, but the steam bath on his dog parts got made me laugh. To this day, he watches the banjo burner like its a shocking stick.

Great thread Revvy.

Fumbled a hydrometer into the primary. Batch got infected. Oops.

Well, I'm just on my first brew, so I don't know how it turned out. However, when the specialty grains were done steeping, I was talking to a couple friends who were over and had a couple of Dogfish Heads in me. Without thinking, I reached into the hot mash to grab the bag of grains out. Probably left a few scalded skin cells in there! :cross:

After racking on top of fruit puree, I had a Cherry Wheat gush out of my (5) gallon secondary for a few days. I use an airlock instead of a blowoff tube, so just cleaned things up every few hours, refreshed the airlock with water, and waited until it finished doing its thing.

It turned out great. (12) months later and the last bottle is chilling in the fridge.

Just spotted this thread. I have done my share of bonehead things, too.

1. When I started brewing I used to ferment my beer in plastic buckets in a cubby-hole behind the furnace in my basement. It worked well to begin with (summer), and then I couldn't figure out why suddenly all my beer started tasting awful (winter when furnace was cycling in and out).

2. Racked my wort into the carboy before I had drained 2 - 3 quarts of Star San (beer turned out fine).

3. Bottled an entire 5 gal batch before I realized the priming sugar was still cooling on the counter. (I have actually done this *three* times, and once everything was even capped!) Thank god for priming tabs.

4. Totally forgot that I had a stout in the secondary. Found it 6 months later. Was my first ever good stout!

5. Biggest bonehead move was thinking that I would start homebrewing to save money. :cross: My beers have turned out great, though -- not sure that counts.

I just remembered another one...I bottled a beer with Lactose instead of priming sugar. I learned that I have to make sure all the different white powders in the brewer (lactose, maltodextrine, corn sugar, brewing salts, pbw, old onestep,) are all in properly labeled containers.




It carbed slightly on it's own...but tasted a little sweeter than it should have. But it was drinkable.

At least I hope it was lactose.

That was a few months back and I'm still alive, so I don't think it was pbw or anything like that.

I've had several batches that at the time I thought I had really screwed up but I have never made a beer that I didnt drink or dump...but the big one of note is a Pumpkin Ale I made almost 3 years ago.

Instead of using brewers syrup I used real Canadian Maple syrup (its easily accessible here) but I didnt take a refract reading or anything to tell me the sugar content of the syrup. It ended up having a significantly higher sugar content that I had planned. Additionally, I miscalculated how much spices to add...I added some ginger, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, etc for this pumpkin ale. But WAAAAAY too much. Note to noobs..a little goes a long way.

Well when first tasting came around about 4-5 weeks in the bottles it had never carbonated AND I swore I brewed some nasty spiced hooch. It reminded me of nasty moonshine I had in Alabama one time. The spices dominated, no pumpkin at all, it burned my nose, and no carbonation.

Well I sorta left it and dismissed it as a noble effort but likely a bad attempt. Months went by and a friend asked how that pumpkin ale turned out and I said "$hitty". Its like uncarbonated spiced moonshine I said....of course he wanted to try it. So he did and he liked it..in fact he loved the flavor and I will admit the ethyl flavors had subsided considerably and the pumpkin started to emerge amongst the spice.

Soooo...I had 2 cases of this stuff uncarbonated in bottles. I carefully poured them all out into a bottling bucket, drained into a keg, pushed it through a plate filter into a 2nd keg, force carbed it and served it at a Halloween party over a year later and it was a HUGE hit. Everyone loved it.

And the best part...I have all my notes from brewday and I can likely reproduce this beer. It took 14-15 months but I had an amazing beer that I had all but written off. I am not sure why it didnt carbonate in the bottles but i suspect the residual spices may have had something to do with the yeast not being happy, no idea. But it all worked out.

When I was mashing in my kitchen last year I started the run-off into my brand new keggle I'd built. Started eating lunch to turn around to a floor covered in wort, I didn't close the valve on my keg so 1-2 gallons of my first runnings were on the floor! Thus was born my oatmeal floor stout (No I didn't put the runnings back into the pot). Turned out great.

On the other hand my first batch I aerated with a pump from a blow up mattress, with all sorts of dust and crap in it. That batch got infected and spread that to some of my later batches, but I replaced all my plastic so doing better now.

The biggest mistake I ever made was getting into brewing to begin with. It's been a love hate experience. I love it, wife hates it, despite her actions.

Fortunately, the only infections I have suffered have been a debilitating bacterium that seems to favor metabolizing greenbacks and lives within the digital confines of my bank account.

I have a non brewing related bit of stupidity this morning.

Evidently yesterday morning before I left for work, rather than putting my dirty coffee mug in the sink...I put it in the fridge. Didn't notice it at all last night, even though I was going in and out repeatedly for beer...

It might be homebrew related in a sense, because my usual routine in the morning after I drop off my cup, and before I head into the shower, is to go into my brew closet and oogle my carboys, and since the night before I had brought the bucket that I am fermenting a lager in up from the garage storage I have, to do a diacytle rest, I was all excited to peak at it yesterday morning.

My mom used to do silly stuff like that...put things in the wrong place on occasion....sheesh I'm getting old.

conpewter said:

When I was mashing in my kitchen last year I started the run-off into my brand new keggle I'd built. Started eating lunch to turn around to a floor covered in wort, I didn't close the valve on my keg so 1-2 gallons of my first runnings were on the floor! Thus was born my oatmeal floor stout (No I didn't put the runnings back into the pot). Turned out great.

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I use my bottling bucket as my primary and when I clean it I drain the star san through the valve to clean it...well I didn't close it back before I poured my wort and lost about a gallon to the beer gods. Just made a smaller batch that time.

Revvy said:

My mom used to do silly stuff like that...put things in the wrong place on occasion....sheesh I'm getting old.

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I wasn't going to say but since you brought it up, sounds like a definite "Senior Moment"

On the subject of "Senior Moments" When I woke up this past Wednesday, I had a sore back and sides. Could not figure out why. Until I went to move my carboy from my brewday on Tuesday. Then it struck me. I am old enough that a full brewday makes me sore the next day. Holy carp!

dontman said:

I wasn't going to say but since you brought it up, sounds like a definite "Senior Moment"

On the subject of "Senior Moments" When I woke up this past Wednesday, I had a sore back and sides. Could not figure out why. Until I went to move my carboy from my brewday on Tuesday. Then it struck me. I am old enough that a full brewday makes me sore the next day. Holy carp!

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Yeah.....I mentioned a few weeks ago that I through my back out while on the floor using my grain mill...

And some times even lifting a 3 gallon fermenter does my back in...but I know that feeling about a long brew day on your feet...

(Gee I hope I remembered to turn off my coffee pot.)

It is still to early to tell how this will turn out but in my no smell primary setup I accedently did not run my outdoor hose through a heating system yet so for a few days the nice freezing weather had a direct route from the outdoors to my beer

Now of course I have a nice long hose running along my heating duct so the air that reached the blowoff bucket is warm

The first time I brewed I was using Mr. Beer and a West Coast Pale Ale kit. I really had no idea what I was doing (if you asked me what FG or a hydrometer was I would have been bewildered), and the kit told me to use table sugar to prime the bottles. Rather than calculate how much was needed, add it together, boil it, etc I just used a spoon and added the recommended amount to each bottle, filled it up with beer, and shook it vigorously to mix. To recap that means I risked contamination and ridiculous oxidation in one simple step! It came out as good as a beer using prehopped LME and table sugar could be and got me started on this site!

My next beer was a bass ale clone and I was at college stuck using one of those old school ranges with a coil of hot metal trying to heat my 2.5-3gal brewpot. I had NO problems (surprisingly) with my mini mash (since I had no idea wtf that was, lol) even though I squeezed the hell out of that bag. It took about 50 mins to go from 150F to boiling, and the second I took my eyes off the pot, I had a huge boilover...I then did not mix NEARLY enough and my OG was about .2 off of my target. I also had a stuck fermentation (wouldnt drop below 1.022) since I just pitched my dry yeast right from the freezer on top of the wort. The beer turned out great, and probably would have been better if I didn't drink almost all of it within 3 months of bottling!

My bavarian hefe which was my last brew (since I got a job almost 2 weeks after brewing it) took about 2.5 hours to get down to temp with intense stirring, obscenities, and all the ice in my freezer (~6 trays full). My impatience made me pitch my smack pak at a balmy 80F, but the beer turned out fine, got right down to gravity (maybe high by a few points) and won me 3rd place in the hefeweizen category (of which the winner got best of show with a berlinner weisse...wtf?!)

Therefore, RDWHAHB!

oinyo said:

It is still to early to tell how this will turn out but in my no smell primary setup I accedently did not run my outdoor hose through a heating system yet so for a few days the nice freezing weather had a direct route from the outdoors to my beer

Now of course I have a nice long hose running along my heating duct so the air that reached the blowoff bucket is warm

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I have never seen someone go to so much trouble just to vent ferment co2. How much smell are you getting? I keep six fermenters going pretty much at all times with no "no smell" system in place and I have no smell in my house.

dontman said:

I have never seen someone go to so much trouble just to vent ferment co2. How much smell are you getting? I keep six fermenters going pretty much at all times with no "no smell" system in place and I have no smell in my house.

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OMG! I just realized what he is implying.... That is a first for me, that is for sure.
Uhhhh, your blowoff bucket can be right beside the fermenter. No need to vent outside!