Worst thing you ever brewed?

Another thread on this forum made me think of this.

What is the worst thing that you have ever made? I'm not talking about infections or anything like that. Just something that you thought was a good idea, that you made and totally sucked.

For me, it was a licorice sweet stout.

It was a good idea, I thought, maybe it would be like good and plenty? I like those.

Boy, was I wrong. Tossed in some star anise and when I tasted the wort, I knew something wasn't right, because it had a weird, spice bitterness. Today, almost 2.5 months after brew day, the taste remains. Not wanting to throw out 5 gallons of bottled beer, so I guess time will tell on this one.

What about you fine folks?

Strawberry mango juice and baker's yeast in a milk jug when I was in high school.

My second batch ever was an oatmeal stout. I guess it was supposed to be a partial mash and I had no idea what I was doing, it turned out about as light colored as a budwiser.

Just kegged a wet hopped/homegrown hopped pale ale, it had blown the airlock, and I didn't get home until it had been off for a day or so. Tastes like nail polish.

I had a kit IPA that I made, it turned really dark going into the fermenter, and somehow (PEBCAM) the hops bag developed a hole and I didn't get the hops out when I transferred to the fermenter... I tasted it after a couple of weeks and decided to let it go a bit longer. About a year later (still in the primary) I tasted it and thought .... Oh ****.

Nasty

My first GF IPA. Tastes like bitter nasty (not hop bitter, just bitter nasty). I've learned much since then.... all three beers ago. I've done a lot of "normal/real" beer and figured the sorghum was just a substitution. Wrong!

i had a coopers extract wheat beer that come out tasting like total dog %$#& still got 24 in the fridge guess im going to dump them

true brew amber ale kit. tasted like pure garbage. thing is, it wasnt me at all since a friend brewed the same thing a few months prior. tasted exactly the same.

DO NOT BREW TRUE BREW AMBER ALE. yelch.

My first batch. A dry stout that I let ferment under florescent light and in an old (scratched) bucket. Skunky and infected were two things that time didn't help too much... in fact it got worse.

Completely dry carbonated apfelwine. Cant give it away.

Edworts Haus Pale Ale.

My first and only dumper. I messed up somewhere. It was one of my first 3 Ag's.

Out the gate I picked up a canned Czech Pilsner kit. I fermented the beer at room temp and it threw out an unbearable amount of diacetyl. It was BAD. I almost didn't do a second batch but I'm glad I did. It was a wheat beer that turned out great and got me hooked on brewing.

This reminded me of another failed attempt at fermentation:
My first batch of cider.

I miscalculated how much apple juice I needed, so I ended up with 1.5 gallons instead of the 3 gallons that I wanted. I was already off to a bad start. I bought up some cheap apple juice at the local warehouse club, making sure that it was free of preservatives. I dumped it, along with some Lalvin E1118 ( I think) into a sanitized carboy and left it for a few weeks.

Flash forward to bottling day, and I tasted it and I knew something wasn't right. I think that because I didn't add sugar, it had dried out to vinegar-status in a matter of weeks. I tasted it and thought that it would go great on some french fries. I bottled the batch and 3 weeks later tried a bottle: It tasted like dying easter eggs. Unnacceptable. I left it a few more weeks, just to see if it would improve. WRONG. Stayed the same, intolerable sulfur-y mess.

I dumped all those bottles and chalked it up to experience.

lowlife said:

Completely dry carbonated apfelwine. Cant give it away.

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I had a batch where the airlock dried out and it went a little vinegary.... can't make enough of it to please the neighbors and friends... I have no idea why they like it so much.

Christmas spice ale ....... hands down the worst beer I ever made.............


eeeeh i can taste it just thinking about it now...................

I had a stalled fermentation last year, but I bottled it anyway. it was like drinking brown sugar. I made it all the way through 2/3 of the batch before I decided I couldn't stand it anymore.

IrregularPulse said:

Edworts Haus Pale Ale.

My first and only dumper. I messed up somewhere. It was one of my first 3 Ag's.

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I have a keg of the same beer I'm getting ready to dump. It turned out great the first time I made it (keg lasted less then a week). This one is cloudy and has that medicine/astringent/nail polish taste. I am going to replace all my hoses before I brew again.

They worst part is I have an empty pipeline otherwise.

The worst brews have all included fruit. One batch of cider...YUCK. WAY TOO HOT and winey. And raspberry wheat for a roomie. Terrible idea. Thou shall not disobey Reinheitsgebot.

WTF - I'm reviving this 10 yr old thread. Been brewing off and on since the 80s and I've brewed some great stuff. And then there were some brews that were hard to be proud of. Usually they result from my screwing with the recipe and going with add ins or using totally wrong yeast or hops for the style just because I have them on hand.

My dad gave me a couple of Munton's no-boil can kits. American Pale Ale. The kind with the yeast packet under the lid. It's the thought that counts, I guess. I waited until they were almost expired and then decided I'd brew them for grins instead of throwing them out. I hate wasting beer. So I brewed both kits together in one batch and skipped adding the table sugar the recipe called for. Brewed fine but was less than impressive when I tested it before bottling. So I boiled and pureed a pound of dried figs and added it to the beer in a secondary. Worked like crazy again. The finished product was like some kind of raisin beer/wine that was hard to describe. Sort of a taste like dipping a fig newton in a flat diet coke. I actually drank most of it over time but I tended to pour a glass out of a liter bottle, drink that, and then never get around to finishing it and pour the rest out. Not my finest brew adventure.

I've screwed up batches with oak too. Some beers don't take to the bourbon barrel thing well. I've learned to brew experimentally in half batches. I usually drink even the bad ones. 2 gallons of dismal grog is a lot less depressing than 5.

A coors lite clone.

Came out perfectly


Tasted exactly like coors lite



It was terrible.

made a 2nd runnings beer out of a christmas beer. It was around 1.030 and I added chai tea to it along with what turned out to be 30 ibu's and fermented it with sa05. It was terrible.

Barleywine. Every. Single. Time.

Where to start?
1. First brew kit a loong time ago. A brown ale. Not even sure it ever fermented.
2. A mild, a 3% beer with over a pound of caraaroma. Bad idea.
3. A DIPA and a tripel brewed with well water that had been chlorinated like mad. All the campden in the world would not have saved them.

I dont know what y'all are doing wrong!!! Even my worst juvenile efforts 33 years ago STILL, tasted like ambrosia season with the tears of baby jesus. . . . . . And sometimes bandaid

It was after about my third batch. I tried to make a beer with "leftovers". I think it was about 1/3 mashed grain, 1/3 malt extract, and 1/3 table sugar. Only made about 9 bottles. It was a horrible, dry cidery mess. I think I drank it all though.

The only thing I dumped was an Irish Red that got infected. Went sour and starting getting very gushy/foamy.

I brewed an English style pale ale, nothing out of the ordinary at all. But I used Wyeast 007, a yeast I had never used before. Since I brew 10 gallons ata time, I waited a couple of weeks and tapped the first keg and it was awful. It had a flavor I couldn't identify but I also could barely stomach it. After drinking about a gallon of it over a month, I turned the last four gallons into a delicious malt vinegar. About a year or so later I was looking at keg tags in one of my 2 kegerators and found the second keg. I didn't need any more vinegar so I decided to just pour it out in the yard. Luckily I tasted it first and it was excellent. My best guess is that the yeast never settled out in the first keg. The moral of the story is that if you can afford to, wait before you dump a bad batch.

I just remembered a true failure. My brew partner and I brewed 4 10 gallon batches one weekend. Everything went well through the brewing process but we realized we had no way to keep the fermenters from the 4 batch cool. And of course we had a winter heat wave, the beer fermented at around 85F, and it was fairly gutwrenching to drink a pint. We forced ourselves to drink it as punishment

A Witbier fermented with WB-06. This was very early 2017, when I started brewing and didn't know WB-06 was very diastaticus. Bottles had a slight overcarbonation issue and the aroma and taste were not what I expected. Although I had people that liked it. It was more tangy/sour than expected and I didn't like it.

Northern Brewer accidentally sent me a bacon beer kit for free so I brewed it one day and it was absolutely disgusting!!! I used it to marinate a turkey but the alcohol in the beer dried out the bird so it was just a total loss of a brew day a keg and a turkey 3 time loser. I also ordered a Northern brewer kit that used chipotle peppers years ago and that ended up so spicy it was ridiculous so I bottled it and used it as a prank beer several times it was pretty funny no one ever expected it.

corkybstewart said:

I brewed an English style pale ale, nothing out of the ordinary at all. But I used Wyeast 007, a yeast I had never used before. Since I brew 10 gallons ata time, I waited a couple of weeks and tapped the first keg and it was awful. It had a flavor I couldn't identify but I also could barely stomach it. After drinking about a gallon of it over a month, I turned the last four gallons into a delicious malt vinegar. About a year or so later I was looking at keg tags in one of my 2 kegerators and found the second keg. I didn't need any more vinegar so I decided to just pour it out in the yard. Luckily I tasted it first and it was excellent. My best guess is that the yeast never settled out in the first keg. The moral of the story is that if you can afford to, wait before you dump a bad batch.

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That, sir, is great advice. If it sux, leave it a couple of months and try again. I made a batch of sake years ago and it would not clear up. After a month in the bottle it was cloudy and pasty and I was about to toss a gallon of it when my buddy talked me out of it. I stuck it in the top of the closet and forgot about it. 6 months later, we ran out of beer at a party and I remembered it. When I took it down, it was so clear you could read the newspaper thru the gallon jug. We drank the entire thing in shots warmed in the microwave - except for the part the ladies drank on ice. Which was really saying something since my wife is not a fan of home brewed anything. Lesson learned - leave it alone and see if it ages into something better.

Altbeer using a kit x2, dme and steeping grains. That day I learned about scaling recipes which is not always linear. Extremely black and bitter from the specialties. Kept the bottles around for 4 years, came out even nastier.

I recently brewed a Blonde Ale that just was not my cup of tea. The recipe was from a very reputable brewer but it just wasn’t the beer I like. Interestingly, one of my Christmas guests really seemed to enjoy it. I dry hopped it and took it out of rotation to mature. A month + later it’s turned into an ‘OK’ pint but still not one I’ll ever brew again. One thing though: it is clear as a bell. Probably the brightest homebrew I’ve had on tap.

Black Witbier. It had star anise. I hate anise. I probably should have thought of that before I brewed it.

Bell's Two Hearted clone. Followed the recipe to the letter, and it turned out technically a good beer....but I hated it. Grassy grassy grassy piney yuck. I like piney in moderation but could do without the grassiness I got from the Centennial. It was also dry as a bone, bleah.

And other than abject failures when I was first learning, I've brewed two for a friend that I won't touch with a 39 1/2 foot pole; one brewed with jalapenos and the other with habaneros. He loved them but....eeew. I still have some bottles that I can't get rid of.

I tried making a pumpkin beer using sweet potatoes instead of pumpkin.

Tried.

We won't be doing that again.

I did a Raspberry Wheat from berries we grew. My wife called it the Dirty Clam, it was not good.

A friend did a smoked stout, added too much smoke and it was like drinking an ashtray.

Snuffy said:

Sort of a taste like dipping a fig newton in a flat diet coke

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LOL, and as far as the topic goes....you mean other people make good beer?

Wheat free Blue Moon clone attempt #1. Just use more flaked oats, right? Add amylase enzyme to ensure conversion.

Like drinking mineral oil strained through oatmeal.