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

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
I was chilling a batch of a Caribou Slobber clone with a wort chiller. I usually just turn the faucet on and let it go periodically checking on it to see if it is cooled to temp. Well, at one of my checks, to my horror I found that one of the clamps holding the hose had come loose and water had been pouring into my kettle which was now overflowing?! I had less than a gallon of room at the top of my kettle to start with but I had no idea how much water had poured in but it had been 15 minutes since I made my last check. Tasting the hydrometer sample, it tasted a bit watered down, but my OG was only off by about 5 points so I decided to rack it to the fermentor. Well, after bottling and letting it condition in the bottles for a couple of weeks, it looks as though it's going to be a pretty good beer after all. No more watered down taste, just really good beer! :mug:
 
I was cooking honey to make a burnt honey mead. Burning honey makes bees go nuts. I ended up with a few bees in the honey, and they went into the fermenter. The mead was amazing.
 
I've got a fresh, new story for the thread!

Still in the process of boiling my first all-grain brew (A SMaSH MO & Challenger Ale). Came time to vorlauf and nothing was coming out because the tubing connecting the false bottom to the spigot in my mash tun had fallen off and was mixed into the grain.

All I could think to do was pour the whole thing into my fermentor bucket, cut a longer piece of tubing (luckily i had extra), reconnect the false bottom to the spigot and pour the mash back into the mash tun then sparge. Wasted an extra half hour on the whole process.

Fingers crossed something drinkable comes out of the whole mess, but i'm gonna be pretty surprised if that happens...
 
I've got a fresh, new story for the thread!

Still in the process of boiling my first all-grain brew (A SMaSH MO & Challenger Ale). Came time to vorlauf and nothing was coming out because the tubing connecting the false bottom to the spigot in my mash tun had fallen off and was mixed into the grain.

All I could think to do was pour the whole thing into my fermentor bucket, cut a longer piece of tubing (luckily i had extra), reconnect the false bottom to the spigot and pour the mash back into the mash tun then sparge. Wasted an extra half hour on the whole process.

Fingers crossed something drinkable comes out of the whole mess, but i'm gonna be pretty surprised if that happens...

I've done this on more batches than I care to admit. Aside from being a PITA during brewday, I have never detected any off flavors once in the keg. Some people worry about hot side aeration, but I have never experienced it. As long as your normal brewing procedures are sound, you should not have anything to worry about!
 
I was brewing a sort of Pliny extract clone (Hop Hammer IPA from BYO) and after I finished steeping my grains, I added too much water BEFORE I added the extract. So when I added the extract, it brought the volume of my 5 gallon kettle up to about 4.75 gallons...I was way too scared to start the boil with this volume, so I scooped out several cups of the wort until it was down to about 4 gallons. My OG, which should have been around 1.085, was about 1.070. Yea, I was bummed, but the beer turned out to be a total hopbomb and was delicious!
 
I've dropped a pressure relief stopper and the fermenter's gasket (I use the Blichmann 14.5 SS Conical Ferminator). Once was right after pitching the yeast, another was 7 days into fermentation. I used a brewing glove that comes up to my bicep, washed and sanitized. I stuck my arm right in the beer to fetch them both out.

So I can say that I've partially swam in my beer. :)

Beer turned out fine, as always. RDWHAHB is for real!
 
It's looking like I might be having another one of these moments again. I bottled the Hellfire IIPA today, & it smelled fruity/citrusy & pepper aroma'd as I prepared to bottle it. The spigot, however, had other plans. Even though I strained the wort going into primary, That 2 packets of US-05 were bedeviled from the start. Darn spigot plugged a few times & I lost about 6 bottles tops. Still got 50-12oz bottles, but they were quite cloudy, what with my attempts to save as much of a $70 batch as I could. This batch has been bad luck since I pitched the bloody yeast! It's been fighting me every step of the way!
So at this point, I have to say...Make those big starters! Rehydrate 3 packets of dry yeast if BS says so! It'll finish faster than this one with two packets (pitched yeast 9/24), & keep all those hops fresher for enjoyment later. I've since learned with this batch that big beers can't be cheated on! They NEED those big yeast loads to finish in about the same time as mid-gravity ales would. This will definitely preserve all the flavors you/we work so hard for in the boil. so, I give. I'm buying a 2L flask for a starter to use in the mumme I'm researching/saving ingredients for! It'll cost even more, not to mention research time, time finding sites to buy all the gruits from, etc. It deserves better than I've been giving them. Lesson learned! :mug:
 
This one started be fore I even put the water in the brew kettle. I sent SWMBO to pick up my grain bill from NB along with a extra couple grains for another future batch.

When she got home everything she bought was in one large bag. I had a 28lb bag of mixed grains for a 10 gal batch. what to do?

Took out 4lbs, crushed it and brewed it up!

It turned out pretty good! I'll never really be able to duplicate it.

The tap handle was labeled F'd up!
 
I've just racked onto some Starsan in the keg (forgot to tip it out after running it through the diptube/lines). I think I got most of it, probably at most 500ml remaining (19L keg). Beer tastes fine (unfortunately, I had left over beer in the fermenter)
 
This thread makes me feel much better after I accidentally dipped my index finger into the wort in the fermenter while I was checking the temperature. It's my first attempt at home brewing and I've been pretty nervous about how sanitized everything should be, so this thread has been a bit of a relief!
 
ok on my first all grain the conical brew bucket had a leak so I dipped my forearm in a bucket of star san and turned the washer....beer turned out fine.

Also I found this thread because I again forgot to check the drain port on the conical fermenter.....I did the star san forearm dip again....the drop was small but it is a pliny the elder clone on day 2 of fermentation......fingers crossed.
 
Last week I racked fresh beer that had been fermenting in the primary for two weeks onto about half a gallon of starsan in the secondary. My heart sank till I seen that the two liquids were not mixing - I suppose from stratification due to density. Since the Starsan was forming the upper layer, I just let the fresh beer continue to overflow the carboy till all the Starsan was pushed out. When I removed the autosiphon, there was just enough head space that I put a airlock in it, then cleaned up my mess without worry. Since I had a dish tub sitting nearby, I just set the carboy in it to catch the beer.

Today it's crystal clear still in the secondary and taste great. I just need some empty kegs to put it in. The only thing that saved me was that I had a 5.5-6 gallon batch. From now on, I'll be dumping all the Starsan out of the carboys when I put it in. Previously, I would put in a half gallon and seal the top so that the only thing I had to do was swirl it around and dump when it came time to use it. I just got in a hurry this time and forgot to dump. lol
 
A recent pilsner sucked in about 20oz of starsan water when I cold crashed. Best lager of mine to date!
 
There was a wattle tree out front of my house in flower, full of bees, I grabbed a bunch of the flowers and made tea with them and added it to my fermenter. It had a pelicile for about 2 days and when I went to bottle theres was one or two ants.

Seems great so far.
 
I brew outside and sometimes you get a bee to buzz around while brewing during the boil. One time I just had to leave there were so many but at the end of 60 minutes they were gone. Well at the end of the cold crash I opened the lid there where a couple flouting there. Beer was my best beer to date.
 
forgot to add honey to a honey wheat, added it 2 days into fermentation... great beer.

several times have forgotten to add sugar or last minute spice additions, just dump them in with the yeast when the beer has cooled down(i don't have a wort chiller, so beer goes into the fermenter hot and then i wait for it to cool while it's standing in an icebath).
 
Before I got a chiller, I made the mistake of pouring too hot wort into a Better Bottle. Melted the h*** out of it. I was able to save the beer, but SWMBO and my son nearly wet themselves laughing at me.

I have a fermelter of my own at home! My first time brewing on my own equipment I ran boiling wort through my counterflow chiller and tubing to sanitize it and then without thinking put the hose in the brandnew Big Mouth Bubbler... With Gravity doing what it does and the Bubbler was on the ground, near boiling wort started trickling via gravity into the fermenter... Funny thing is I didn't notice that it had melted the fermenter till I brought it in the house later that evening! The Imperial Blond was awesome!

:tank:

IMG_2462.jpg
 
Funny thing is I didn't notice that it had melted the fermenter till I brought it in the house later that evening! The Imperial Blond was awesome!

:tank:

LOL! Sometimes after a long day of brewing and drinking, I probably wouldn't notice that either!!! :tank::tank:
 
Nothing too serious on my end. The blonde ale I made earlier this year was supposed to have 0.5oz additions at 55 and 30... I accidentally did 1oz additions instead. It turned out a bit more bitter than intended, but is still a perfectly drinkable beer.
 
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.

I came up with a statement that holds true for brewing as it does for IT work (my vocation)...

"It's amazing how complex brewing is in it's simplicity". If you think about it it's really a simple process that humans have been doing for thousands of years with even knowing or understanding the science behind it, yet it is a marvelously complex task to accomplish!

:mug:
 
My roommates and I went in on our first home brew together and were stupid excited, but also devastatingly nervous. We were making a belgian tripel and all was going well when we got to siphoning the chilled wort into the fermentation bucket. Because we were stupid college guys and didn't read the directions for (nor thought we needed) the auto-siphon, I simply siphoned the way my dad taught me to siphon gas out of cars - suck on the tube until you have flow!

Well, once the wort hit my mouth, I instinctively turned my head and spit STRAIGHT into the fermentation bucket before I even realized what I was doing. There was stunned silence all around the room as we stared at my crime and we all hung our heads low as I apologized profusely.

We continued with the whole process, hoping against hope that our first brew would at least be drinkable. Bottling day came and went and it was time to crack our first one open...

And it tasted fantastic! In fact, ever since I've used it as the standard by which I measured all of my following brews against! We even took some to our local home brew supply store and gave it to the guys who helped us get started and they said it was some of the better beer they'd had in a long time.

My name being Jet, we affectionately named the brew "Jet's Spit".

P.S. Don't get any ideas - despite the glorious success, I'll never support nor replicate spitting into your wort to see what happens. Thought it's tempting for my ego, I don't consider my spit to have magical brewing properties. :)

:mug:

Hold fast.
 
My roommates and I went in on our first home brew together and were

P.S. Don't get any ideas - despite the glorious success, I'll never support nor replicate spitting into your wort to see what happens. Thought it's tempting for my ego, I don't consider my spit to have magical brewing properties. :)

:mug:

Hold fast.

Great story... But don't be so quick to discount spitting in the process of fermentation. :D

If you're not familiar google Dogfishead Chicha.

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DU1QvXghc8[/ame]

:mug:
 
First wort hopping: I added the FWH to the mash tun prior to lautering rather than to the boil kettle. Did this for several batches. Believe it or not they turned out OK, maybe slightly attenuated bitterness but not as much as you'd think.

That is my definition of First Wort Hops. I do that on ma few beers and every time on my special bitters.
 
While I don't make mistakes ever... (lie) Once I picked up all the ingredients for a nice extract batch.

except hops

and I had none at my house, none in freezer.

what I did have was hops from a 1 gallon kit that was 2 or more years old. not even sure what they were, just a sealed shiny vacuum pouch.

People liked it, tastes like Strohs is what I hear from a lot of people.
 
I can't seem to hit my volumes reliably but if I hit my fermentation temps right it is almost always good beer. I have made more bad beer by making my own recipes or by subsitution of hops.:mug:
 
In my last IPA, I got everything finished up, yeast pitched, fermenter moved downstairs, and I rigged up a blowoff tube (I anticipated an aggressive fermentation) and realized a few days later that I never cleaned/sanitized my blowoff tube..the one that I stuck right into the bung that was sticking down maybe a half inch into the carboy. I was paranoid about infections the whole time.

The beer has been good to drink for a month or 2 now and it's perfectly fine.
 
I can't seem to hit my volumes reliably but if I hit my fermentation temps right it is almost always good beer. I have made more bad beer by making my own recipes or by subsitution of hops.:mug:

Same here with the volumes. I'm still getting used to tweaking all grain settings in Beersmith, so it usually calculates way too much water, which essentially waters down my wort and I end up with way too much pre and post boil volume, which in turn lowers the OG. Sigh..maybe one of these days I will get it right.
 
When I was bottling my third batch (a grapefruit sculpin clone), I started siphoning from secondary into the bottling bucket and got halfway through before realizing I never added any priming sugar. Had to stop, cover the bucket (and bung the carboy) and boil up some sugar water haha.

Another one - on my VERY first batch (a one gallon IPA), I was prepping my sanitizing water so I could pitch yeast and seal up the little jug and accidentally cut open the yeast packet (it was white and so was the sanitizer pack) and dumped about 1/5 of the packet into the water before realizing what I was doing. To be fair, I'd been drinking... :p

I was afraid of crappy carbonation between bottles on the grapefruit sculpin clone and a lack of healthy fermentation for the one gallon IPA, but both turned out great. In fact, I'd say the GF sculpin was probably one of my best batches.

You live and learn, like we've all seen and heard. I just do the classic RDWHAHB.
 
I have forgot to let my yeast get to room temp before pitching and have thrown it in at fridge temp. Beer tasted fine.

I have reached in a primary bucket for the rubber seal from the lid. Good beer.

My airconditioning went out once and I fermented a Bock at 80F! :eek: Tasty beer.

This one isn't mine. My dad used to brew a beer when I was a kid. This was before Chuck P. It was an old prohibition recipe. It had a half cup of table salt in it and half a potato! We used to drink it in highschool. It wasn't that bad at all.

Bottom line is it's REALLY hard to prevent the yeastie beasties from doing their job.

Same thing happened to me with the temp. Brewed the Saturday before last and my heat pump started acting up. Had to turn off the AC during the day while we were at work, and the house would get up around 78-80. I'm bottling this weekend. Hopefully it's OK.
 
I'm gonna revive this old thread and lay out my mistake on my second beer. I just did my third today

I pitched my yeast and sealed my fermenter and right after I noticed I had two spray bottles, one was sanitizer and one was nature's miracle urine destroyer. At some point or another the nature's miracle made it into my fermenter LOL. The beer turned out great though :mug:
 
This is one of the best threads I have ever read. As a noob, I am glad to know I am not alone. I was drunk and ending up using my bottling sugar in my boil, so I had to use honey for bottling. I actually used a calculator for this. My first batch was not as carbonated as I like, but not terrible. Have another batch going; a IIPA, where the carboy o-ring fell into the fermenter when I dry-hopped it. We'll se how it is in a few weeks.
 
I have a fermelter of my own at home! My first time brewing on my own equipment I ran boiling wort through my counterflow chiller and tubing to sanitize it and then without thinking put the hose in the brandnew Big Mouth Bubbler... With Gravity doing what it does and the Bubbler was on the ground, near boiling wort started trickling via gravity into the fermenter... Funny thing is I didn't notice that it had melted the fermenter till I brought it in the house later that evening! The Imperial Blond was awesome!

:tank:

View attachment 348033
Yeah....did the same thing...except in my case, the spigot popped out, and I had still hot wort pouring onto my sneakers and elsewhere in the living room. If I hadn't received burns on my foot, I dont know if I'd be alive today
...
 
This has been an awesome thread for a new brewer like myself. My favorite part has been that 3/4 of these start with, "Well, I was drinking a lot while brewing and...." :ban:

After doing my first batch this weekend, I recorded everything in my logbook, including what beers I drank while brewing and what vinyl I was listening to. It'll be fun to look back at that one day :rock:
 
I've been brewing for 21 years and my brew buddy has about 30 years experience. However, while brewing a Maibock and starting the chilling process we forgot to turn the pond pump on that circulates ice water through the plate chiller as well as the ground water to the counter flow pre chiller. I was watching for the frost line on the receiving fermenter but it was not there. I put my hand on the side of the fermenter and burnt my hand. A rookie mistake.
We had to slowly and gently transfer the hot wort back into the BK and start over.

Despite our fears the resulting Maibock was very good with no signs of hotside aeration.

This mistake resulted in a permanent check-off sign.
IMG_20200116_102356.jpg
 

Latest posts

Back
Top