I learned a valuable lesson today.....

....if you drop a spoon into your boiling wort, don't go after it with bare hands. D'OH!!!

Actually, the real lesson may be: don't home brew with >2 beers in you (if you're a lightweight like me).

So today I learned how NOT to brew, and how TO brew while soaking a hand in cold water!! :rockin:

It's only a matter of time before I'm a braumeister!!

I too learned something today.
If you run out of one step-sanitizer don't use bleach in its place.
Inhaling bleach fumes all day will do bad things to you.

I burned my hand on my first batch because I wanted to rinse the carboy with a little boiled water. That was stupid for many reasons. The glass could have cracked (but did not), though I ended up buring my hand and dropping stuff. After that I switched to no rinse sanitizer.

Thinking in terms of extremes, I wonder if anybody has ever fallen into a vat in a commercial brewery? Haha - literally 'dead guy' ale. I'm sure dead rat ale happens all the time.

larrybrewer said:

Thinking in terms of extremes, I wonder if anybody has ever fallen into a vat in a commercial brewery? Haha - literally 'dead guy' ale. I'm sure dead rat ale happens all the time.

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With the sanitizing practices in place in breweries I highly doubt that a rat gets near the opening of the brew kettle. But then again you never know. I do know that most breweries have a cat or two around just to keep the mice out of the grain sacks.

Sounds like you made it out ok, so now on to naming the brew. What style was it? We can help with names.

2nd degree saison
skin graft stout
burning flesh brown ale
lost skin lager

J/k, but don't reach into boiling anything with a body part.

stevea1210 said:

Sounds like you made it out ok, so now on to naming the brew. What style was it? We can help with names.

2nd degree saison
skin graft stout
burning flesh brown ale
lost skin lager

J/k, but don't reach into boiling anything with a body part.

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It's a red ale kit from Northern Brewer. How about "Red Handed Ale"?

I'm really lucky. Icing it seems to have completely done the trick. I'm still pretty shocked I'd do something so stupid. Oh well. Maybe worse has been done???

2 beers and u were sticking ur hand in a pot of boiling wort? Can I borrow your body for a week?

Nooby said:

Oh well. Maybe worse has been done???

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I can top that. When i was 16 and working at Mickey D's a girl dropped a Chicken Nugget in to the vat and went after it with her hand. She had horrible burns past her wrist and didn't show up to work for over a month. Luckily for her she didn't do anything permanent, but it was a little more than a close call. Also, you can't say she was young and stupid because she was closer to 30.

Even if you were 16 you'd have to be completely idiotic to reach into
a deep fryer.

"Shucks that don't look too hot!"

Nooby said:

....if you drop a spoon into your boiling wort, don't go after it with bare hands. D'OH!!!

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You and my wife must have gone to the same school o'brewing!! While she and I were brewing a batch, we had the wort boiling on one burner on the stove, but then moved it to another burner... Not 5 minutes after the pot was moved to the other burner, she grabbed the grate that sits over the burners, in an attempt to "adjust it" because it was sitting crooked on the cooktop!! Needless to say, she let out a squeal, and rushed to the sink for cold water!! I couldn't help but laugh at her for her moment of stupidity...

Glad your hand was okay though... boiling wort - ouch!

larrybrewer said:

Thinking in terms of extremes, I wonder if anybody has ever fallen into a vat in a commercial brewery? Haha - literally 'dead guy' ale. I'm sure dead rat ale happens all the time.

Click to expand...

Have you ever heard the irish ballad/tale of the whiskey distiller?
An Excerpt:
Uncle Ted fell in a whiskey vat last week. Some men tried to pull him out, but he fought them off bravely and drowned.
We had him cremated and he burned for three days.

My stupid act didn't cause any bodily harm, but did royally piss my wife off. I was doing my first AG last weekend, when it came time to move the boil pot from the porch to the kitchen so I could cool it I decided it was too heavy and hot to carry so I just slid it across the floor. All was well until I got to our kitchen, looked back at the path I walked and saw the long trail of black that was left on our living room carpet by the bottom of the boil pot. oops! Next time I'll use a towel.

Mine was leaving the stainless steal braid off of the mash tun. I didn't realize it until I was trying to sparge and grains kept coming out. I ended up with Sticky Arm Ale.

OP - Do yourself a favor and buy one of these. Its worth the $4.50 and it will never fall into the pot where you can't reach a dry part of the handle. Get a 28" or 24"

NORTHERN BREWER: Stirring and Straining

Yup, I love my ~30" spoon. Can't drop that in too far!

I have a friend who has a string tied on the end of his spoon that will float or hang out of the cooler. If the spoon falls in his mash tun he can pull it back out with the string.

GreenwoodRover said:

Have you ever heard the irish ballad/tale of the whiskey distiller?
An Excerpt:
Uncle Ted fell in a whiskey vat last week. Some men tried to pull him out, but he fought them off bravely and drowned.
We had him cremated and he burned for three days.

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or this one.

Ernie had worked at the brewery for 30 years. One day he slipped and fell into a vat of beer and drowned. His supervisor felt it was his duty to inform the widow. He walked up to the widow's door and knocked. He told the widow what had happened. The widow let out a wail, and started sobbing. Drying her eyes, and gaining her composure, she asked the supervisor if Ernie had suffered, or died quickly. The supervisor replied that he didn't think that Ernie had suffered. In fact, he said we saw him climb out of the vat to use the bathroom 3 times before he died.