Attention to detail saves money, aka lets talk about stupid mistakes!

I am brewing up a nice Belgian Saison right now, but for the life of me I could not figure out why I had a stuck fermentation at 1.030 after almost a month in the primary. I aerrated the hell out of it, pitched at 70F, added yeast energizer, and let it ferment at around 90F. I could not figure out why my HYDROMETER wouldnt do its thing and show me wwhat I wanted to see.

This is where attention to detail pays. I recently bought a new primary that while the same size as my original primary it is somewhat more squat. Can you see where I am going with this?

Anyways when I was putting in my wine thief to draw a sample I wasnt getting as much into the chamber as I was used to, thus my hyrometer was bottomed out in the wine thief with the gravity mark at 1.03. Yeah, I r teh smart brewer. When I put in a proper sample amount the fg measured out to 1.010.

This dumb mistake cost me a vial of unused white labs saison II and a case of 1L swingtop bottles I purchased when I bought more yeast at the local shop, but hey, awesome bottles, right!

Lets talk about dumb mistakes due to not paying attention to the little things.

Not sure how you were doing this. The Hydrometer never touches the primary right? so the Primary is out of the picture.

A little lost - HOWEVER - I've made dumb mistakes like forgetting a pound of grain and so forth and getting everything ready to bottle EXCEPT bottle caps

So far, I've not had any real "D'oh!" moments on a brew day. Well, forgetting to take the yeast out of the fridge, but that only cost a little time.

Wait, there was the time I forgot to buy ice. Tried cooling the wort in a "tap water bath." yeah, it ended up sitting in the sink overnight before it was cool enough to pitch.

I've gone into bottling day:
-without bottlecaps. Had to run to the LHBS (20 mile round trip(thru traffic))
-without sanitized bottles
-without priming sugar
-forgetting to add the priming sugar
-without a box, container, or place to store the full bottles

ANd my all-time worst oversight, on brew ot bottling days:
-not having any beer to drink (THAT was pitiful)

My biggest dumb moment...

I brew with a 5g igloo cooler. I don't have a manifold or anything on it so I put in a grain bag. Works great.

So on my last brew, I heat up my water, pour it in to the cooler, let it sit for a few minutes and check the temp and it was just right. Then I proceed to pour my grain in, and when I'm about halfway I realize I hadn't put the grain bag in.

Had to dump it all out into my kettle (of course I only had half the grain in there, so it's sitting a little hot) and then transfer it back. Came out fine though.

Grinder, I apologize, I was typing that whole thing out on my cellphone. Sure, it has a full keyboard, but damn if I can type much more than a sentence coherently.

Anyways, what I meant to say was that my wine thief was not filled to an acceptable level (which is where I measure OG/FG with my hydrometer. It was not filled high enough because I was not used to such a short, squat primary, and in such I didn't push the wine thief in deep enough to fill it properly. In retrospect, I can not imagine how I didn't notice my hydrometer resting on the floor of the wine thief, which was giving me incorrect readings.