Ever Had One Of Those Days?

I brewed today, first time with my Top Tier rig. A simple recipe I saw in the recent issue of BYO, Gose. So, I move my rig from the garage outdoors and in the process gash my knee open. As I am setting up, a swarm of love bugs invades my house. For those of you who dont know, these bugs are here in Florida and breed this time of year. So you will see big black clouds of these bugs flying while mating, thereby being called Love Bugs. They dont bite but they are prolific, as evidenced by everyones cars being trashed by them. So I try bug spray and citronella torches to no avail. I go to light my burner and I bend down to adjust the flame when the burner flashes and in the process I burn my cheek and lose part of an eyebrow. When standing up to get away from the burner, I crack my head on the burner above me. After several strings of cuss words, I get my strike water to heating. I dough in and hit my strike temp, first thing to go right so far. But no, I check my pH and for some reason, its 3.6 ( my tester was calibrated last night). I did not have any CaCO3 around so I tear through my cupboard and find baking powder. I just had enough to raise my ph to 5.2. Thank goodness I did not add gypsum to my strike water. I lauter and sparge and find that I am 2 gallons short. So I heat up more sparge water and resparge, finally getting my preboil volume. Good news, my preboil SG was on the money, how is anyones idea. While boiling the damn thing would sporadically boil over the entire time, so I had to stand there and watch it, in the process getting sunburned. When I run the wort through my new plate chiller, I guess I let it go to fast and it didnt chill as low as I needed, so I put it in the freezer to chill the rest of the way. Oh, and my line going into the chiller popped off and I instinctively grabbed it to push it back on, forgetting that this is boiling wort and ended up scalding my hand. The entire time I had to keep fighting off the bugs as they were getting into everything, strike water, BK everything. I wish I knew the amount of bug parts allowed in homebrew. LOL But I did strain the wort as it went into the fermenter, so nothing big got in.

Even my first beer I brewed in my kitchen was not such a fiasco. I hope this damn beer is worth it.

No. I can't say I've had one of those days. Seems like you had a couple additions to the "injured while brewing" threads out there, but hopefully the final beer is good.

Oh man, I feel like that kind of stuff happens to me quite a bit, like I'm a living a 3 stooges hell. But I have to say your day sounds like it was very, very rough. However if I may offer words of encouragement: It'll be hard for your next brew day to go as bad, so you have something to look forward to!

I've never had any brew days go that bad but it seems like the more people are over to watch, the more stuff goes wrong. I Brew alone and everything works out great.

The reason I brewed today was that the wife was at work and the kids at the grandparents, so I was alone. This brew was definitely full of blood, sweat and tears, and maybe a few bugs too.

Wow!!! That was a fantastic disaster of a day. You need to go to your room, shut the lights and just go to bed. Do not risk doing anything else today.

Sorry to hear that, man. It gets better and it gets easier.