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

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Did my 3rd brew yesterday.

First brew is bottled conditioned now and I can't believe how good it is. Nothing but astonished praise from friends (mainly Germans, who are not known for their politeness ;) Second was bottled yesterday and tasted lovely.

Couldn't stop myself and did my 3rd after bottling number 2 as my Cascade hops / Carafa Special 3 & wort chiller arrived in the post.

Everything went to plan: steeped the special malts, followed my boil schedule perfectly, then when I put in my wort chiller 15 mins from end of boiler, it reduced the temp to about 90C. I waited and waited, but it just would not get back to 100C! Then I panicked thinking I was messing the hop schedule up so concluded to finish the boil.

No idea if the wort chiller was sanitised or not, but the ale tasted good and 20 hours later is bubbling away steadily.

Maybe i got away with it, we'll see :)
 
I didn't realize that I had one of my last batches fermenting in one of my buckets. I had a couple of painful corns and a large bunion on my feet so I soaked my feet in the bucket for several hours. Unfortunately I failed to sanitize my toes before soaking them. I thought it was funny that the soak seemed cooler than usual.

Anyway, I didn't realize until several days later that the beer was supposed to ferment at 64F and my foot soak raised the temp to 66F. Do you think I ruined my beer? Should I add some campton tablets?
 
one of my first batches was supposed to be a blue moon clone.
I didnt know about late extract editions so it came out much darker than it was supposed to.
The temps for ferment were too high and it had many fruity esters. It turned out to be a really good belgian dubbel and was well received by my friends.
 
When bottling my first batch I sanitized everything except the bottle caps.

I made a tripel that I thought waaaay over attenuated and was thinking about adding something or maybe even dumping. After bottle conditioning it was a great great beer. When I bottled it I found the airlock plug in the yeast cake that had fallen in there when I started the ferment.

I made my recipe on Beersmith with 2oz of 5% EKG hops for the 60 min boil. Only after tasting a hydrometer sample after fermentation did I realized that the EKG I used were actually 7%
 
drummstikk said:
Sure, I remember being a newbie and wondering the same things, "Is it infected?" "Did I ruin my beer?" Of course the answer to both is almost always "no".

One of the first beers I ever made, I added some sugar during the ferment. I was so worried about sanitation that after boiling the sugar, I only let it cool for 5 minutes or so before adding it to my fermenter!

The temperature of the beer went up to the high 80's for about 12 hours, and needless to say, it had some off-flavors. It was WLP001, but most people who were trying to be nice said it had some "spicy" or "Belgian" flavors. I entered it in a competition for feedback, and the judges unanimously told me it had too strong of an ester / sulphur profile.

I was so worried about sanitation, but I should have been worried about the fermentation temperature. The best method was of course to boil the sugar, let it completely cool, then add it. But given a choice between the two extremes, I would have been better off just adding the sugar straight to the fermenter without ever sanitizing it.

I wish somebody had told me how important the ferment was, and how unimportant, at least in comparison, sanitation is.

But even that beer wasn't ruined. We finished all 5 gallons after all! So, I think I understand the spirit of this thread.

But don't we serve our new brewers best not by telling them RDWHAHB (Papazian's indelible hippy mark on our hobby), but by telling them what does matter, alongside telling them what doesn't really matter?

Every new brewer wants to make a good beer; that's why they worry. But given that making good beer is the goal, isn't knowing what actually matters for making a good beer the most relaxing thing of all?

Here's an example from cooking: If you watch Good Eats but you've never cooked before, you might think that making breakfast is horrendously complicated. Alton Brown gives recommendations for equipment, ingredients, temperature, seasoning, and on and on. But the only thing that really matters is watching your bacon cook, and taking it off the heat when it looks done.

If you were going to help a newbie in the kitchen relax, this is probably what you'd tell them, "Just watch your food and stop cooking it when it looks edible." That's relaxing advice. But if you told them not to worry about anything, (Relax, Don't Worry, Drink Some OJ), then when their bacon turns out a little well done (edible but not great), they have a giant list of recommendations to try, each with supposedly equal importance. To me, that's anxiety-inducing.

It's obvious not to burn your food because we've all cooked before, but it's not obvious to new brewers that the ferment is more important than wort production. I heard the standard advice to chill out when I was new, but it really just made things worse. I was making beer that was drinkable but not great, and I wanted to make it better. But there was that huge list of techniques and ingredients rolling around in my head, each equal contenders for the cause of my beer's crappiness.

If someone had told me, "Relax, Don't Worry, Do Temperature Control", then I could have actually relaxed, because I would have known one simple thing I could do differently next time.

Maybe the slogans should be this, RDWDCT and RDWMAS (Relax, Don't Worry, Make a Starter".

I think we're right to tell new brewers not to worry, but unless we tell them what to do instead of worrying, we're not doing them any favors.
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True. But a new brewer can get overwhelmed with not knowing something. There were a few things that I never learned til after 6 months of brewing. I remember getting all worked up or bent out of shape trying to figure some things out at first. There are things you should be concerned about but then alot of times your worrying about things you dont need to worry about. Also you cant always get answers, people end up repeating themselves to give advice and alot of times what a brewer needs to know exactly doenst get through to him/her or gets left out or not brought up-its hard to troubleshoot what went wrong when someone dosnt know all the exact details of how that persons beer was brewed. For instance what if a brewer had not known his ingredients were old like hops/malt and they were trying to figure out why the beer tasted like azz-when someone just says "you didnt pitch enough yeast" or maybe they simply had chlorinated water but it never got brought about in getting advice. Its why its a good idea to get a book also.

Yes there are certain rules in making good beer and they should be pretty much pointed out in the stickys and from what I remember its discussed in the stickys. A brewer will not get all the advice they need in one or two threads, its an ongoing learning experience. I spent months learning how to brew before buying/beginning-only because I knew it was simple but yet complex. Even after brewing a dozen times I was still learning alot. And there were things I was/wasnt doing that I should have been doing. Its probably rare to have a begginer brewer instantly become an "experienced" brewer. Either your gifted/lucky or practice practice practice.
 
jonmohno said:
True. But a new brewer can get overwhelmed with not knowing something. There were a few things that I never learned til after 6 months of brewing. I remember getting all worked up or bent out of shape trying to figure some things out at first. There are things you should be concerned about but then alot of times your worrying about things you dont need to worry about. Also you cant always get answers, people end up repeating themselves to give advice and alot of times what a brewer needs to know exactly doenst get through to him/her or gets left out or not brought up-its hard to troubleshoot what went wrong when someone dosnt know all the exact details of how that persons beer was brewed. For instance what if a brewer had not known his ingredients were old like hops/malt and they were trying to figure out why the beer tasted like azz-when someone just says "you didnt pitch enough yeast" or maybe they simply had chlorinated water but it never got brought about in getting advice. Its why its a good idea to get a book also.

Yes there are certain rules in making good beer and they should be pretty much pointed out in the stickys and from what I remember its discussed in the stickys. A brewer will not get all the advice they need in one or two threads, its an ongoing learning experience. I spent months learning how to brew before buying/beginning-only because I knew it was simple but yet complex. Even after brewing a dozen times I was still learning alot. And there were things I was/wasnt doing that I should have been doing. Its probably rare to have a begginer brewer instantly become an "experienced" brewer. Either your gifted/lucky or practice practice practice.
Click to expand...

10,000 hour rule. READ. EVERYTHING.

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A few months ago,I brewed a couple IPA's,one of them my all-NZ hopped Maori IPA in my ale pail. I realized not cleaning the spigot that time was a bad idea. It got a bad lacto infection by dry hop time,which was 5 weeks. It didn't seem to want to drop into the FG range BS2 determined. Mistake #2. So I skimmed off the lacto funk & sprayed Starsan on it before sealing it up again. On bottling day,I racked out from underneath the smaller amount of funk to the bottling bucket & primed. By the time the bottles had carbed & conditioned,I gave'em a week in the fridge. It came out damn near perfectly normal by drinking time. Just a little tiny bit of Belgiany taste,but it seemed to fit the flavor profile. And I'd dipped the muslin grain bag for the dry hop in Starsan as well. Talk about dodging a bullet!...:drunk:
 
I've put isinglass in unsterile water and unsanitized measuring cup into the beer. Right after I did it I thought about sanitation. *Crap*

I've pitched my stir bar right along with my starter. I got it back after primary fermentation. (Glad I have extras)

I've racked my beer from the secondary into a bottling bucket with a leaking spigot. (Why didn't I notice when cleaning and sanitizing?)

I've had the bottling tube come off the spigot during mid keg into the keg. I got it back when the keg was empty.

I've boiled over right after telling SWMBO that I'm becoming a better brewer.

I've left a piece of tubing in Star San solution over night. I only realized it when I was looking for it the next day. I had slime on it and had to re-clean in PBW and re-sanitize.

Broken hydrometers and testing tubes.

I am sure there's more. Wonder what's next. LOL


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Just bottled my chocolate oatmeal vanilla milk stout today and quick did a forced nitrous on 14 oz I didn't feel like putting in a bottle (it was a "sample"). It was in secondary for near as makes no difference 4 weeks with 4 vanilla beans and was in primary for 2 weeks before that so its already super clean, but my screw up.

First, designed the beer thinking 65% efficiency between the oatmeal and the "lets throw a bunch of left over stuff together that's been sitting around" effect. Ended closer to 75% efficiency. Probably due to me sparging the hell out of the grain and ended up having to do a 2 hour boil from a planned 1 hour. Yeast I had didn't seem to be all that viable the wyeast packet didn't swell that much, so with 20 minutes left in the boil, jumped in the car and ran to the lhbs and found the yeast I originally wanted to use, bought that, threw it on top of my defroster and opened the slap pack, got home and brew only went 3 minutes over (123 minute boil written down for future batches).

Took the beer down to the basement to try out my brand fancy spankin new wort chiller, which was working awesome I was at 140 in maybe 10 minutes. My brain literally exploded out of my ears at this point when I realized the cocoa powder addtiion that was supposed to go in right at flame out was still sitting in the garage up stairs. Temp was at like 135 when I got back to the basement and decide "ah, screw it, if it gets infected I'll just say it was meant to be a sour stout from the start" and threw the cocoa powder.

Just did the little nitrous trick I saw on here (with the syringe and stuff) wiith the 14 oz sample. The chocolate comes out so clean with none of the bitter chocolate flavors that I was warned about with using cocoa powder.

This may be the first beer I will feel like I should enter in a competition. I will probably be eviscerated if I enter it as a sweet stout, but I'm happy with it and SWMBO said "I think you did a really awesome job with this one".:mug:
 
Down to the last 10 bottles of my first batch and loving it. I managed to drop the bag of steeping grains and had to fish it out, accidentally trapping it against the side of the kettle and giving it a pretty good squeeze in the process. Also realized about a week info fermentation that I didn't completely sanitize my primary fermenter - filled it up with sanitizer to the five-gallon mark, but didn't splash any on the upper section of the bucket. I was dead certain I was smelling apples when I went in to take gravity readings. When bottling, I messed up my bottling wand and had to go straight from the spigot.

But I waited for it to mature, and ended up with something that tasted like beer, and even a beer that I would order over most basic offerings at a restaurant or bar :mug:
 
TayHoho said:
Down to the last 10 bottles of my first batch and loving it. I managed to drop the bag of steeping grains and had to fish it out, accidentally trapping it against the side of the kettle and giving it a pretty good squeeze in the process.
Click to expand...


They used to think that squeezing the grains would extract tannins but they have since learned that only heat or pH do that. Feel free to squeeze your bag as much as you like.
 
I was making a boddingtons clone and propane ran out in a panic I dumped all the hops in and carried it to my stove where I boiled it for one hour .....turned out within 10% of the flavor profile of the real boddingtons ....very happy brewer!!! Only if there was a way to introduce nitrogen into home brew bottling ...if there is let me know!!!!


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I've brewed a few dozen batches of beer over the last several years, and I still am just as pessimistic and paranoid as I always was. Part of it is from having a brewing partner who is as anal as I am and we compound each other’s anxiety with an over-cautious and meticulous methodology. The reason I think I'm still paranoid is that pretty much all of the batches of beers we've made from extract to all-grain have had a "taste". The extracts had their own specific recurring "taste," and the all-grains now have had a "taste." Tastes that are described in 'Brew Chem 101' and on-line sources to be results of mistakes or wrong doing. We’ve always been extremely conscious about sanitizing—everything all-the time. We've made many different beers in many different ways: filtered water, treated water, different equipment, different ways of going about everything, yeast starting, fermentation habits, the rate and length of boil, different mashing/sparging approaches. Yet they've all had a similar off flavor or just an off flavor; they've been fine and some good, but usually never what I expect. And there are seemingly no common denominators beyond our habitual meticulousness.
Are we just too anal we're messing up the beer in a consistent way because of our habits? Or will our home-brew never taste like craft brew. Does home brew always have a "taste"? Am I just too harsh, my expectations too high? Because I like beer a lot and have had hundreds of different kinds of beer and those beers never (with the exception of maybe a couple) taste like ours. We always joke and lament over the fact that between the brewing books and on-line opinions there is very little consistency in the details and every time we go to brew one of us has read something that convinces us we did it wrong last time or we need to change how were doing it.
Should I just not be brewing?
Does anyone have any insight in to my problem? Because I think the noobs don’t want to become perpetual noobs like me.
 
If you are cleaning everything correctly and brewing everything correctly each beer should be unique! If you have your doubts break apart every ball bearing socket, soak your gear in pbw and star San ,bake your wort chiller and run sodium hydroxide through it ....spend a day on thorough cleaning...go purchase a beer kit and get it done according to the directions and see if that beer tastes the same as you remember it...sometimes the only way Is to destroy your foundation and start up again using simple methods


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After worrying and fretting, as a newbie, I'd just like to pop in for fellow first-time brewers:

Always remember that yeast evolved producing alcohol from fermentable sugars, and that they've been selected for over centuries to do their job DAMNED well, even during times when we didn't even know bacteria existed! :rockin:
 
I caught a sour infection. Twice. I now have a nice brown ale with cherries and red currants (a little like 3 philosophers) and a witbier with kumquats bulk aging that smells fantastic.


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I had just cooled and racked my wort for an oatmeal stout into a 6-1/2 gallon glass carboy. As I was going about my business of cleaning up, I grabbed another carboy by the handle and spun and clipped my wort filled one, breaking off the top 1/5 of the carboy into the wort. I grabbed an ale pale and gave it a quick sani-rinse and racked the wort from my broken carboy into the bucket ... then pitched and fermented as usual.

Turned out okay ... scored a 32 in a local competition and drank it all.
 
I just bottled my very first batch, after the 2nd or 3rd 22oz bottle I realized the plastic piece on my bottling cane was missing. I was kind of stuck with my hands full and couldn't stop the spicket. So one beer for sure is going to be nassssssty!


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Biggest goof of my brewing career...
Forgot to fully cap the liquid side of the coupler on my sanke keg for some pressurized fermentation. The entire contents of the fermenter ended up coming out of the keg by the next morning. Luckily my fermentation chamber is a garbage can, so all of the beer ended up outside the fermenter, but inside the not so sanitized trash can. Not wanting to waste the entire batch, I scooped it back into the boil kettle, boiled it for 20 minutes to re sterilize it, cooled it and pitched a new batch of yeast(hooray for keeping a packet of dry yeast in the fridge fr emergencies). I had lost a full gravity point of OG from the work the first yeast had done, and then boiled away much of that alcohol. Long story short, this beer turned out to be very delicious!!
 
I've brewed about eight brews now, finally on the last batch ran out and bought a food scale for priming. Always felt that while the beers turned out well, 5 oz of priming sugar was too carbonated for my taste.

So i'm bottling my stout, on the evening of the g/fs and my 2 year anniversary and in my haste to finish before our dinner reservation i misread the priming sugar chart and prime with too little sugar. Realized my mistake the next day, and panicked but knew from reading on here to just let it be and wait.

Popped the first one open on St Paddys Day and its the smoothest stout i've brewed yet!

Now need a good summer ale recipe to try in the next few weeks...


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Fells_Pint said:
I've brewed about eight brews now, finally on the last batch ran out and bought a food scale for priming. Always felt that while the beers turned out well, 5 oz of priming sugar was too carbonated for my taste.

So i'm bottling my stout, on the evening of the g/fs and my 2 year anniversary and in my haste to finish before our dinner reservation i misread the priming sugar chart and prime with too little sugar. Realized my mistake the next day, and panicked but knew from reading on here to just let it be and wait.

Popped the first one open on St Paddys Day and its the smoothest stout i've brewed yet!

Now need a good summer ale recipe to try in the next few weeks...


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Click to expand...


What kind of "summer" beer do you like?


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Fells_Pint said:
I've brewed about eight brews now, finally on the last batch ran out and bought a food scale for priming. Always felt that while the beers turned out well, 5 oz of priming sugar was too carbonated for my taste.

So i'm bottling my stout, on the evening of the g/fs and my 2 year anniversary and in my haste to finish before our dinner reservation i misread the priming sugar chart and prime with too little sugar. Realized my mistake the next day, and panicked but knew from reading on here to just let it be and wait.

Popped the first one open on St Paddys Day and its the smoothest stout i've brewed yet!

Now need a good summer ale recipe to try in the next few weeks...


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Click to expand...

If you have fermentation temp control may I highly recommend a steam beer? Personally I think I have a real winner for summer.
 
Accidentally used a full can of Munich LME instead of Pilsner LME in a dubbel. WLP550 did not give a damn...it just made a great beer anyway!
 
No poop, there I was. I had my neighbor over,first time ever, going through a brew day. Being a veteran brewer, I didn't want to scare him away from brewing with an advanced all grain brew. I decided to show him how easy it was to brew an extract beer. No stepped mash, no sparge. So simple, not even a yeast starter was prepared. I was going to pitch safale05. So, there I was talking to a beer snob about how to brew beer. My specialty grains were steeped perfectly. Hop additions were added at exactly the right moment. I made sure to have him smell the different hops that were going into this black IPA. Then, flame out, and discussed the importance of cooling the wort quickly. And... WTF... I forgot to add 9lbs of golden malt!?! UGH, brought it up to a roiling boil, added the damn extract, let it go for 10 minutes. Then talk about how no brew day has ever gone perfect. If it has gone perfect, it's only because you screwed up and haven't figured it out yet.
 
Ok, let's start this off bullet style then I'll change it halfway through to switch it up. Or because I can't keep a theme going.

-Used plain old tap water to top up. No boil, no campden.
-Pitched random slurry amounts with no calculation for cell count. 1 jar per week in the fridge.
-Brewed and bottled while sick
-Bottled up some hop debris somehow
-Brewed/bottled while drinking

And most recently I've been using a juice jug to add extra sparge water to halfway boiled wort. My stove has limited boil capabilities, this allows more time for the burner to be on the wort heating. No big deal. Until later when I used some top up water from the tap to the carboy. It was about the next day I realized that I used my wort-jug for the top up water and not the shiny sanitized one. Having faith in yeast, rolled with it and decided to see how things ended up. A slightly bubblegummy belgian (can't be blamed on the mishap), no infections, no gushers.

Side note: my stove seems to hit an on-off cycle whenever I use a certain stock pot. That would explain why one boils faster than the other. I think it's time to retire the cheap one.

Edit to avoid double posting:
Also I'm a master of falling asleep on the couch while my kettle(s) cool in the cold water filled bathtub. Not the intention, it just happens. Pitch in the morning, all works out fine.
 
Me and my brew-partner were making our first AG batch that wasn't from a kit, so we were pretty psyched. The recipe we based our brew on recommended a 158*F mash and we'd read anything over 170* would ruin our beer. It seemed to be steady, so we took a minute (or five) to enjoy a beer while the grains steeped.

Well, when we got back the mash was at 196*F and smelled roasted if not just burnt.

We continued as normal, which back then for us meant dumping the mash from a 3g sauce pot through a spaghetti colander, into two 1g pots, cleaning the 3g pot, recombining the two 1g pots into the 3g, then pouring hot water over the colander into the 3g to sparge, then boil. Obviously the whole damn kitchen was brown and sticky.

Thankfully, it was a stout and the flavors blended and mellowed perfectly into what we still consider our flagship brew... though we've since been careful not to scorch the grains like we did the first time. Maybe that's why it's never been quite the same...
 
I just brewed my second beer (an irish red extract) and it did not go well at all. I couldn't get the wort to pitching temperature so I used cans of soda that were in the fridge to cool it, I dropped my spoon into the wert and had to use my hand to pull it out. I sprayed everything with starsan but I only let it sit for a second or two before putting it in my wort and I pitched my yeast (after it'd be rehydrating for 30 minutes) at 87F.. Before I went to sleep I checked it, and it was fermenting rather well. Does anyone here think it'll get infected or have off flavors from the pitching temp?
 
deewilliam17 said:
I just brewed my second beer (an irish red extract) and it did not go well at all. I couldn't get the wort to pitching temperature so I used cans of soda that were in the fridge to cool it, I dropped my spoon into the wert and had to use my hand to pull it out. I sprayed everything with starsan but I only let it sit for a second or two before putting it in my wort and I pitched my yeast (after it'd be rehydrating for 30 minutes) at 87F.. Before I went to sleep I checked it, and it was fermenting rather well. Does anyone here think it'll get infected or have off flavors from the pitching temp?
Click to expand...

You might have avoided infection (though you might want to give the StarSan some more time next time around), but 87F is terribly high to pitch it at. What yeast was it, and what's it's temperature now that it's fermenting (if you know).
 
If it chilled down fast enough that might not be a problem... It's possible that it shocked the yeast and killed of some though... The good news is that you'll have beer :D.

A lot of people on here, myself included, have made bigger mistakes and still made something half decent... Just read through this thread for some examples.
 
Zepth said:
Ok, let's start this off bullet style then I'll change it halfway through to switch it up. Or because I can't keep a theme going.

-Used plain old tap water to top up. No boil, no campden.
-Pitched random slurry amounts with no calculation for cell count. 1 jar per week in the fridge.
-Brewed and bottled while sick
-Bottled up some hop debris somehow
-Brewed/bottled while drinking
Click to expand...

I've done all but the 2nd one, and it turned out OK each time. On the 3rd one, I just made sure I didn't cough or sneeze when I was near anything that needed to stay sanitized.

Then there was the time when I used a muslin bag for a hop addition. I tied the end in a knot and just dropped it in the BK and didn't tie it to the side. After the boil and after I chilled it, I forgot it was still in there. When I racked to carboy using the BK's valve, that bag got stuck against the inlet of the valve. Without thinking I reached in with my bare hand and pulled it free. The beer turned out fine, with no infection. But I was sweating it for a few weeks.
 
I forgot to add dme to an extract batch during the boil. I had already transferred it to the carboy, so I said what the hell and poured the dme right in. Shook the crap out of it and pitched the starter. I had to swirl it up periodically for two days until the dme finally mixed fully into the beer.

Turned out great! Probably because I pitched a big starter...

Now I make sure all my ingredients are out on the table while brewing. Lol!
 

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