Biggest Home Brewing Oops

I'm getting a kick out of reading the thread on "how many batches have you dumped and why" (My answer was 1 but "dump" equalled spraying it on the lawn - I hated it, the lawn loved it), and got to thinking back on some of my homebrewing humorous mishaps.

The one that I still laugh about was when I was making a high-gravity irish stout - back in my extract days and it had a solid 12 lbs of DME in it plus additional specialty grains for color and whatnot. I was stretching my batches a bit, so I was fermenting 6 gallons in a fermenter designed for 5 to 5.5 gallon batches - so very little headspace. I was using White Labs Irish Ale Yeast which is a very vigorous yeast and pitched it with a big starter (adding yet another 1/2 gallon to the fermenter now that I think about it). We were in day 2 of the fermentation and my brewing room was a bathroom with a shower just off my family room in the lower level of a "raised ranch" house. We were cuddled up with our kids (who were babies then and now all drinking age) when we hear a VERY loud FOOOMP! from that bathroom, followed by the sound of the airlock and fermenter lid clattering back down.

As you can guess - the lack of headspace caused the krausen to build up and clog the airlock and instead of popping it out of it's hole, it blew the lid off the fermenter with lots of force. There was dark sticky beer foam on the walls, ceiling, shower doors, floor, mirror, etc.

I cleared the airlock, reinstalled it, snapped the lid back on the fermenter and decided to clean up the mess later, and rejoined the family on the sofa. About 20 minutes later, FOOMP! again - this time not quite as loud, but still blew the lid off the fermenter again.

So ... what brewing goof makes you laugh?

(By the way, the stout was awesome - 1.085 SG, 1.018 FG, about 8% ABV and aged wonderfully).

I have a good one to share...
One of my last extract batches, before I moved to AG, was an Imperial Porter. The O.G. was just shy of 1.100 and I had never ever brewed a batch with that high of a specific gravity before. I was pumped!

I let it ferment out for a couple of weeks then transferred into a secondary. Back then I wasn't really tuned into the subtleties of fermentation and even though the S.G. was down to 1.034 I transferred it anyway. After another week I pitched in a packet of champagne yeast, anticipating bottling day. Four days later I bottled the batch.

A month later I made some notes in my brew log about the lessons I learned from this batch. I actually learned a LOT from this one batch that has carried thru every batch since, especially the high gravity batches! The finishing gravity was too high which caused the residual sweetness I was tasting... and the over carbonation. Should have left it in the primary longer and/or let the champagne yeast do it's thing in the secondary longer.

My brew buddy took a few bottles of this batch home with him. He put them in the saddle bags on his motorcycle and rode off into the sunset. When he got home he discovered that a few had broken during the ride. He figured it was just from the rough ride, but as he removed one of the bottles that was still intact and lifted it out it just exploded into pieces... (no harm done... thankfully)

Just under 2 weeks later I made a note in my log calling this a failed batch! 3 bottles exploded making a stinky mess, over carbonation due to it not finishing before bottling.

So it was getting towards the end of August and I still had a little over a case of this batch of potential bottle bombs of almost 6.5% ABV homebrew sitting in the fridge, but I didn't want to just pitch it so I decided to take it with me on a camping trip. I was careful... put all the boxes inside plastic totes (in case any bottles broke during the trip). Made it safely to our campsite with all the bottles intact. We went water skiing and drank those over sweet Imperial Porters. Every one of them would foam like the stupid volcano experiments we used to build as kids for a science fair. Literally! every bottle would spew foam for like 20 minutes after you popped the cap off! We experimented a bit by adding some coffee extract to a few of them. Those actually tasted REALLY good because it helped to mellow the sweetness some. During that camping trip we only experienced one other bottle that actually exploded... one friend that brought a catamaran sail boat took a bottle out on his boat. We told him not to... but he wouldn't listen. Thankfully no one was hurt seriously, but still it drew some blood from the glass shards of shrapnel!

I left one bottle at home during that trip because I wanted to try de-gassing it when I returned. I literally spent months trying to de-carb this last bottle by lightly uncapping it then re-crimping... what a waste of time!

Lessons learned... over pitch that yeast! Let if finish... then really let it finish some more. Then if it is really finished go ahead and bottle it LOL

I had a friend over to show him the ropes. While I'm talking about heating the strike water and mashing in, we pour the crushed grain into my brewpot. Then I realize that the bag I use for lining the brew pot for BIAB is not in place. We waited for the mash to complete and then I tortured my friend by making him help me dump the contents into two coolers, spray out the pot, put the bag in place, and pour the mash back into the pot. So that we could lift the bag to drain. This was a 10 gallon batch by the way.
He enjoys the beer, but he has not asked to come over for another brew day.

I've only been brewing for the past 5 months. Anyways, back in November I was about to bottle a 2.5 gallon Dunkelweizen. As I siphoned the beer into the bottling bucket I began to hear a splashing sound on the ground. I had the spigot in the ON position. I lost about 12 ounces of beer. It was definitely a bad day. 😢😢😢😢😢

Something I'm sure a lot have done at least once... Forgot to put my bazooka screen/tube in my cooler mash tun. Filled with strike water and doughed in. Started the timer, looked behind me and saw the screen sitting in my work bench. I put on probably 10 latex gloves and my dad had to lift one end of the cooler to move most of the mash so I could stick my hand in scalding hot water to install. After that day I wrote real big in permanent marker "INSTALL TUBE SCREEN!!!"

Hoo boy, where to begin, I've had a few.

1.) I was brewing my first lager (an Oktoberfest). I calculated that I needed a pretty big starter: 4L. This was before I knew about cold-crashing/decanting starters. I brewed the beer, transferred it to my carboy, and whipped up a ton of foam with my Fizz-X to aerate the wort. The foam was almost up to the mouth of the carboy. I knew lagers needed a lot of air, so I whipped this bad boy like I was making whipping cream.

Then I went to pitch the yeast. Within the first liter, the foam from the wort started pushing out the mouth of the carboy. The foam was pretty dense, with lots of small, fine bubbles, which only let some of the liquid yeast trickle down through it (the rest ran down the foam "chimney" and down the outside of the fermenter). I managed to get half the yeast in, but this sucker was FULL. I waited for the foam to die down, and several hours later, managed to get more of the yeast in the fermenter. I think I eventually got it all in, but adding 4 liters to an already-pretty-full carboy was a recipe for a blowout and a mess, which of course occurred.

Lesson learned: Cold crash and decant your starters.

2.) Actually, this one was also brewing a lager (Rauchbier). I use glass carboys and brew in my garage. I knew enough never to set carboys directly on hard, rough surfaces (like my garage floor), so I set the carboy on an empty box from my recycling bin. The box was roughly the size and shape of a desktop PC, on its side. Brew day went fine, went to rack the wort to the carboy. Got the siphon going, then turned my back to do some cleanup while the carboy filled. After a couple of minutes, I heard a loud crash, and my garage floor was coated with sticky wort and sharp, glass shards of wildly varying sizes.

The box was plenty rigid enough to hold an empty carboy, but as the carboy filled, it sank into the box and tipped over, smashing onto my garage floor.

Lesson learned: Always consider how much a full carboy weighs.

3.) I'd read (on the Danstar website, no less!) that dry yeast already has all the oxygen it needs, built into it, and that aeration/oxygenation is unnecessary with dry yeasts. So I brewed up a Pale Ale and didn't aerate at all. The way I rack to my carboys at the time didn't even produce much foam during the transfer. I pitched the yeast and let it ride. The beer ended up being a huge banana-bomb. It was undrinkable, and my first dumper.

Lesson learned: Always aerate/oxygenate your wort.

4.) I re-use my yeast. I collect the yeast cake in Mason jars (4 per 5 gallon batch). If the least is less than a couple of months old, I just pitch 1 jar directly (no starter). Yeast older than a couple of months, I just dump. I brewed 10 gallons of a Pale Ale and pitched one of the Mason jars of yeast (that had been collected about 2 months earlier), and it took a good 3-4 days to really get going. I thought it'd be fine, but the beer turned out with too many esters for my tastes (it was like a bitter, hoppy, super-Belgiany ale). My second dumper (I haven't actually dumped these kegs yet, I'll probably get around to that this weekend).

Lesson learned: Use fresh yeast, verify health with a starter, and favour overpitching over underpitching.

I made the yeast mistake again with a lager (although I did it before discovering that the Pale Ale batch was ruined), but in the case of the lager, it never took off at all, even after 6 days. I ended up rehydrating and pitching some S-23 yeast.

I've posted this in at least one of the 5+ threads on this exact same topic but...

The first commercial yeast I tried harvesting was from Unibroue, one of the breweries that inspired me to get into brewing. Didn't know that they filter their yeast and bottle with what I think is a champagne yeast. Built up a culture, and tried to ferment a 1.080 dubbel with it. Let it go for a bit over 3 weeks (still some airlock activity but I was a newb) and bottled.

5 days later they start exploding. One by one, the entire batch, all ~50 of them. I put on a hardhat, safety glasses, a leather jacket, winter gloves, and 2 pairs of jeans to carefully put them into a double walled cardboard box and set it on my back deck. They blew up one by one over the course of a year. I didn't even go near that box until I moved out

Bert_T said:

I've only been brewing for the past 5 months. Anyways, back in November I was about to bottle a 2.5 gallon Dunkelweizen. As I siphoned the beer into the bottling bucket I began to hear a splashing sound on the ground. I had the spigot in the ON position. I lost about 12 ounces of beer. It was definitely a bad day. ����������

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Ha ha! Been there, done that.

Bert_T said:

I've only been brewing for the past 5 months. Anyways, back in November I was about to bottle a 2.5 gallon Dunkelweizen. As I siphoned the beer into the bottling bucket I began to hear a splashing sound on the ground. I had the spigot in the ON position. I lost about 12 ounces of beer. It was definitely a bad day. ����������

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12 WHOLE OUNCES!?!?!

if that's your biggest, consider yourself lucky dude

I was brewing on a gas stove and I guess there wasn't enough air getting to the burner. I ended up setting off the Carbon Monoxide Alarm with 15 minutes left to go in the boil. I added my 0 minute hops and cut the heat right there. Turned out to be an awesome brown ale, but the CO bit scared us real good. My wife got a headache on top of it, which was real bad news to boot.

I brew outdoors now.

pitched my stir bar into my conical fermenter with the starter. Didn't think much of it until I opened the ball valve on the bottom of the fermenter a week later to drain trub/yeast and the stir bar dropped into the ball valve and jammed it open. Once the trub/yeast finished draining, I was going to have 5 gallons of beer follow it. Luckily, I remembered that I had a spare tri-clover ball valve before disaster struck and I attached it to the end of the stuck ball valve just in time. That batch had so many mistakes/accidents happen to it from start to finish, I ended up calling it "Murphy's Law IPA."

Ran wort from my mash tun into my kettle... with the ball valve fully open... and walked away. Came back to a delicious smelling mess all over the driveway!

Learned to TRIPLE check after that one.

I'll bite...

1. One of my first all grain batches I was still trying to figure out how to keep my mashing temps consistent ended up mashing around 160-170 for the hour. Needless to say that beer got dumped. I think after the calculations it might of been 1% ABV and didn't taste that great.

2. Really disappointing actually, I bought a kit from Austin Home Brew Blue Moon Clone. I thought the process went great but the beer tasted like soap. It was awful. (I contacted the company they said maybe I got an infection...I don't think so but nothing else could explain why it tasted that bad)

3. Again...disappointing I got another kit from Austin Home Brew this time it was a Stella clone...it tasted like shyte. I didn't contact the company I figured it was pointless (lesson learned I stopped buying clones from Austin Home Brew never had a problem with any of my other beers to date..)


I have stopped buying clone kits and started using recipes off of this forum or things I have developed and never looked back...so far not one has been dumped.

When I first started brewing 7 years ago, i bottled, like most. I cleaned my equipment really good as a routine, but hated bottling. As a result, I was a bit sloppy cleaning the bottles. One day, on the way to work, my wife called me and told me she'd heard 2 loud BOOM's that sounded like shotguns going off in my office. I knew what had happened as soon as she told me. I spent a couple hours that night cleaning up the Porter from the floor, walls, and ceiling of the office, as well as scooping up the glass from the floor. Then she told me she'd looked at it, and there were glass shards from the bottle bombs stuck in the back of HER office chair and HER lampshade, and she asked me if I realized what would have happened if she was sitting there at her computer... I switched over to kegging that week, and haven't bottled AT ALL in almost 7 years...

We'll I also forgot to add that since I let the dunkelweizen ferment at room temp. It was a butterbomb. Luckily the chocolate malt kind of masked it......kind of.

I Bottled the beer without the priming solution and realized it 2 days after... I opened them and put the priming solution but I lost all those caps plus it was a pain in the ass to pour the solution in each beer

I broke a carboy by filling it with hot wort and setting in a cold in-ground swimming pool.

It's easy to convince yourself that these things will work, but in the end you find yourself in the wee hours of a cold January night, standing in a pool wearing pajama shorts and tennis shoes, wading around looking for shards of glass and praying your wife doesn't catch you.

StewMakesBrew said:

As you can guess - the lack of headspace caused the krausen to build up and clog the airlock and instead of popping it out of it's hole, it blew the lid off the fermenter with lots of force. There was dark sticky beer foam on the walls, ceiling, shower doors, floor, mirror, etc.

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kombat said:

Then I went to pitch the yeast. Within the first liter, the foam from the wort started pushing out the mouth of the carboy.

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Yea, been there done that (the following video is from my superdumb noob days. I know there's a ton of stupidity there. I don't do any of that stuff anymore!) I was trying to teach my brother in calif how to brew by making videos. Thank god he didn't follow my example.

Spent grain spill.. on a barley wine too, of course.

Probably should have used a blowoff? One out of four isn't bad. Coulda been worse. Believe me though, I didn't put my face over #4 there - poke an eye out.

That magical thing about his following pic, which just happened last month, is that the smaller flask in the back burst about 5 seconds after I took this picture. Right in front of my eyes. If you look closely at the pic, there's a long diagonal crack on the back of it.

I've been making starters just like this for 7 years. Same flasks (the larger one is in a video I posted above, which was back in 1999 I think). I think the lesson learned here (that's the net result of a thread like this, isn't it?) is to MAKE SURE YOUR DME IS DISSOLVED IN SOLUTION before putting on the burner. I'm 95% sure that's what caused this late night meltdown. BTW, thank god my wife was in bed. Took me an hour to clean this sticky mess up that night.

passedpawn said:

Yea, been there done that (the following video is from my superdumb noob days. I know there's a ton of stupidity there. I don't do any of that stuff anymore!) I was trying to teach my brother in calif how to brew by making videos. Thank god he didn't follow my example.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8CAyasNwag

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"Oh boy..I should of boiled a little more..or payed attention" Man I was laughing so hard during this video it made my afternoon. Good stuff man.

passedpawn said:

That magical thing about his following pic, which just happened last month, is that the smaller flask in the back burst about 5 seconds after I gook this picture. Right in front of my eyes. If you look closely at the pic, there's a long diagonal crack on the back of it.

I've been making starters just like this for 7 years. Same flasks (the larger one is in a video I posted above, which was back in 1999 I think). I think the lesson learned here (that's the net result of a thread like this, isn't it?) is to MAKE SURE YOUR DME IS DISSOLVED IN SOLUTION before putting on the burner. I'm 95% sure that's what caused this late night meltdown. BTW, thank god my wife was in bed. Took me an hour to clean this sticky mess up that night.

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Couldnt she smell it the next day? I can't hide any sort of starter boilover

m00ps said:

Couldnt she smell it the next day? I can't hide any sort of starter boilover

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Probably not, but the sticky was still everywhere. I think she's so used to my hijinks she just ignores. Been married 29 yrs next month.

Every time I brew or bottle I crack open a few and when I'm done I'm like, "Did I forget to do something? ". I think we ALL forget 'something'.

carloscede2 said:

I Bottled the beer without the priming solution and realized it 2 days after... I opened them and put the priming solution but I lost all those caps plus it was a pain in the ass to pour the solution in each beer

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Bert_T said:

Every time I brew or bottle I crack open a few and when I'm done I'm like, "Did I forget to do something? ". I think we ALL forget 'something'.

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I also made a small batch of German Wit which I fermented in two 1 gallon jugs. We'll while pouring the wort into the first jug I didn't use a funnel, so sticky wort ended up all over the kitchen floor. Praise the God's above that my wife is understanding. Lol. Anyways now I make sure to funnel.

I also made a small batch of German Wit which I fermented in two 1 gallon jugs. We'll while pouring the wort into the first jug I didn't use a funnel, so sticky wort ended up all over the kitchen floor. "STICKY!" Praise to the God's above and the beer in my gut that my wife is understanding. Lol. Anyways now I make sure to funnel.

Built a cooler-type mash tun, forgot to get a hose for the output. Figured it would be ok on brew day.

It took three hours to drain 6 gallons out of that thing. And if hot side aeration is a thing, well, it's aerated as all get out.

Tried to cheap out the first time transferring wort into a carboy, and used a new funnel I had from the auto parts store instead of a dedicated brewing funnel. The splash-up from each gurgle of air displacement put sticky wort all over my basement floor.

TexasDroughtBrewery said:

"Oh boy..I should HAVE boiled a little more..or payed attention" Man I was laughing so hard during this video it made my afternoon. Good stuff man.

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ftfy

Otherwise, I of no idea what you mean.

Bert_T said:

Every time I brew or bottle I crack open a few and when I'm done I'm like, "Did I forget to do something? ". I think we ALL forget 'something'.

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Yep. For me it's usually the gypsum, Irish Moss, or OG sample.

Dirt_McGirt said:

Tried to cheap out the first time transferring wort into a carboy, and used a new funnel I had from the auto parts store instead of a dedicated brewing funnel. The splash-up from each gurgle of air displacement put sticky wort all over my basement floor.

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Stick a bent paperclip in the mouth of the carboy, next to the funnel spout. That will allow air to escape the carboy while the liquid drains in and prevent those sloppy "BLOOP BLOOP"s.

passedpawn said:

That magical thing about his following pic [of a burst flask of DME], which just happened last month, is that the smaller flask in the back burst about 5 seconds after I took this picture.

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I just don't get why people still insist on boiling/cooling their starters directly in the flasks. The shape of the vessel is the worst you could possibly devise for boiling a liquid that's going to foam up, getting narrower and narrower toward the top, easily causing hot, sticky "volcanoes." Plus each heating/cooling cycle stresses the glass, and even if you're using a proper borosilicate one (as I presume you were, passedpawn?) you can still get uneven heating and have a failure like the ones in these photos.

Why not just boil/cool it in a pot, THEN pour it into your flask? I've read countless stories of busted flasks, but never a single story about anyone causing a huge mess by preparing their DME in a pot.

Or even better, pressure can some starter wort ahead of time, then prepare your starter in minutes, with no mess at all. Totally eliminates all this risk.

Bert_T said:

I've only been brewing for the past 5 months. Anyways, back in November I was about to bottle a 2.5 gallon Dunkelweizen. As I siphoned the beer into the bottling bucket I began to hear a splashing sound on the ground. I had the spigot in the ON position. I lost about 12 ounces of beer. It was definitely a bad day. 😢😢😢😢😢

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Ha! It's not a real brew day without either leaving a spigot open or having a hose disconnect itself. That's just what I do.

passedpawn said:

Probably not, but the sticky was still everywhere. I think she's so used to my hijinks she just ignores. Been married 29 yrs next month.

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Congrats man. 29yrs with a homebrewer, what a saint

kombat said:

I just don't get why people still insist on boiling/cooling their starters directly in the flasks. The shape of the vessel is the worst you could possibly devise for boiling a liquid that's going to foam up, getting narrower and narrower toward the top, easily causing hot, sticky "volcanoes." Plus each heating/cooling cycle stresses the glass, and even if you're using a proper borosilicate one (as I presume you were, passedpawn?) you can still get uneven heating and have a failure like the ones in these photos.

Why not just boil/cool it in a pot, THEN pour it into your flask? I've read countless stories of busted flasks, but never a single story about anyone causing a huge mess by preparing their DME in a pot.

Or even better, pressure can some starter wort ahead of time, then prepare your starter in minutes, with no mess at all. Totally eliminates all this risk.

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I just always liked the volcanoes...reminds me of elementary school. But with a much higher chance of being badly burned

I just don't understand the risk ... and I'm the guy who defends glass carboys!

View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1454000819.639686.jpg

This was fun. I've worked in a kitchen for over a decade and knew that if something is about to boilover just turn off the heat and don't try to move it. I guess that night I forgot and reflexively grabbed at the flask...it overflowed more...

Pop it!

Nope, that was about 2 years ago. My wife who works in the burn area at the local hospital told me specifically to let it naturally pop itself to avoid infection, and since I like my thumbs I took her advice.

tmendick said:

Nope, that was about 2 years ago. My wife who works in the burn area at the local hospital told me specifically to let it naturally pop itself to avoid infection, and since I like my thumbs I took her advice.

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Well isnt that convenient in this case? :rockin: