For fun, describe the worst brewing disaster you can imagine

Brewing a light lager. Mash, lauter, boil, aerate, pitch and seal the fermenter. At the end of your long and arduous brew day, happy with the very light color you were able to achieve, you realize you forgot to crush the grain.

A 3-tier stand in an earthquake.

Liver disease.

the snark meter is over 9000 in here today

what did you expect?

You really don't need to imagine anything...there are true stories all over this board

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/smash-blood-sweat-tears-17144/

I dropped a carboy full of fermented beer once...stepped on the glass barefoot, blood everywhere...

I'm well beyond the old college and roommates days, but I can imagine roommates getting tanked and "tampering" with a buddy's active fermenter as a joke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Beer_Flood

323,000 gallons spilled and 8 people drown in it.

That was a pretty bad brew day.

nickharbour said:

Brewing a light lager. Mash, lauter, boil, aerate, pitch and seal the fermenter. At the end of your long and arduous brew day, happy with the very light color you were able to achieve, you realize you forgot to crush the grain.

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Brew day went perfect up until yeast pitching time. Then suddenly it gets very dark outside. A cloned tyrannosaurus rex has escaped the Jurrasic Park Island, swam to the states, hitch hiked Kentucky and is now towering over me. He bites me in half, and swallows everything from the waist up. Except, of course, the kidneys, appendix and miscellaneous guts that slipped out during the bite. That was going to be a good beer, too.

couple of batches ago I was filling the bottle bucket from the primary as my buddy had me distracted. over his yapping I heard a noise that sounded like someone peeing on the floor.. lost almost a gallon cause the damn spigot was open. wish I just imagined it but no...

Worst brew day ever this past weekend. Locally, we celebrated National Homebrew Day a week late because of a big microbrew fest the weekend before.

1. I signed up to brew the Wit. Sponsors had the porter ingredients which meant I had the wrong yeast starter ready.
2. The 2-row they had for me had a ton of bugs in it so I had to run home and get my own.
3. It was around 55º and drizzling/raining all day, and we were out in a big parking lot. I didn't have a canopy.
4. It was my first 10 gallon batch, so I fell way behind. Everyone else was packing up when I was getting ready for my boil so I just put all my wort in buckets and went home to do my boil under the cover of my garage.
5. After my boil, I hooked up a new attachment to my wort chiller, turned on the water to chill, water started spraying out of the connection. I luckily was wearing a jacket I was able to put over the spray so I could run in and get a hand towel.
6. Once it was chilled, I tried whirlpooling since everyone convinced me to stop using hop bags. My valve clogged within seconds.
7. Used my siphon pump to get out the first 5.5 gallons. About 2 gallons into the second carboy, the siphon clogged with leaf hops. My 4th time cleaning out the siphon, it broke. I had no other option besides using a sanitized pitcher to scoop it out and dump it into the carboy.
8. Remember how I said I had a starter for the wrong beer? Well luckily I had a few jars of 1056 in the fridge. Unfortunately they had been in there for a little over a month, so they were totally inactive, but I pitched them anyway. Three days later, they still weren't fermenting so I checked the gravity. No change.
9. Added a pack of US-05 to both this afternoon.

If that doesn't work, I think I'm going to have a mental breakdown and never brew again.

Brew a barleywine.
Wait a year.
Open bottle.
Coors Light.

I have not done anything drastic so far. But my worst fear is dropping a pot of wort on the way from the stove to the sink for its icebath/heat exchanger. 200f liquid all over the legs and feet? Yeesh.

Or maybe picking up a bottle and having it bomb you right in the face. That would suck.

I was lucky that only my SWMBO died from CO poisoning during the mash, and I made sure to open the garage door the rest of the day. The propane didn't seem to be working properly, but once my shirt caught fire I knew things were humming. I finally got the flames out just in time to start the boil and faint into the kettle. Hey, who cares what goes in, it's all gonna sterilize in the boil, am I right? Luckily when my timer went off the propane tank exploded, which woke me up just in time for my hops at flameout. Unfortunately I wasn't able to add my bittering hops because they had been consumed by my dogs. I got my chiller set up perfectly, except for a small issue when steam came rushing out over me for a while and I passed out under it a little. When it came time to pitch the yeast I realized it had caught fire three or four times already and was unusable. I just left everything to ferment openly, and grabbed a homebrew, because RDWHAHB, right? Bottle bomb right to the jugular. Then I was turned into a newt.

I got better.

Like the time my house and brewery flooded and I had to pour out 30 gallons of fermenting beer? And the the next day we waded in with crowbars to pry open my walkin cooler to salvage as much kegged beer as possible? Good times..

Aftermath

I'm paranoid I'm going to drop a carboy. Starsan solution is very slippery.

I had gotten the distinct impression that SWMBO was up to no good. All the signs were there - staying out late with no explanation, quickly clearing her e-mail screen when I'd walk in the room, whispered phone calls, i was getting pitying looks from her friends, you know the story. So one day, when she was out late. She claimed that one of her friends had picked her up, but i knew better. I decided to hide in the basement and watch out the little front window for her to come home - I knew HE'D be driving and I wanted to get a look at this SOB. As I was crouching down peering out the window, out of the corner of my eye, I happened to see the fermenter, which contained the last batch we had brewed together.

I noticed that the fermentometer had gone all the way up to 72. Is my batch ruined? I rigged up a swamp cooler to bring the temp down but I'm really concerned about esters because this is supposed to be a nice clean cream ale. Will esters go away with time? Any way to tell if esters have developed already?

Ghostly said:

I was lucky that only my SWMBO died from CO poisoning during the mash, and I made sure to open the garage door the rest of the day. The propane didn't seem to be working properly, but once my shirt caught fire I knew things were humming. I finally got the flames out just in time to start the boil and faint into the kettle. Hey, who cares what goes in, it's all gonna sterilize in the boil, am I right? Luckily when my timer went off the propane tank exploded, which woke me up just in time for my hops at flameout. Unfortunately I wasn't able to add my bittering hops because they had been consumed by my dogs. I got my chiller set up perfectly, except for a small issue when steam came rushing out over me for a while and I passed out under it a little. When it came time to pitch the yeast I realized it had caught fire three or four times already and was unusable. I just left everything to ferment openly, and grabbed a homebrew, because RDWHAHB, right? Bottle bomb right to the jugular. Then I was turned into a newt.

I got better.

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A lot of lulz in this one. +1

JonM said:

I had gotten the distinct impression that SWMBO was up to no good. All the signs were there - staying out late with no explanation, quickly clearing her e-mail screen when I'd walk in the room, whispered phone calls, i was getting pitying looks from her friends, you know the story. So one day, when she was out late. She claimed that one of her friends had picked her up, but i knew better. I decided to hide in the basement and watch out the little front window for her to come home - I knew HE'D be driving and I wanted to get a look at this SOB. As I was crouching down peering out the window, out of the corner of my eye, I happened to see the fermenter, which contained the last batch we had brewed together.

I noticed that the fermentometer had gone all the way up to 72. Is my batch ruined? I rigged up a swamp cooler to bring the temp down but I'm really concerned about esters because this is supposed to be a nice clean cream ale. Will esters go away with time? Any way to tell if esters have developed already?

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I know that feel bro. haha love it.

robtotten said:

Brew day went perfect up until yeast pitching time. Then suddenly it gets very dark outside. A cloned tyrannosaurus rex has escaped the Jurrasic Park Island, swam to the states, hitch hiked Kentucky and is now towering over me. He bites me in half, and swallows everything from the waist up. Except, of course, the kidneys, appendix and miscellaneous guts that slipped out during the bite. That was going to be a good beer, too.

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This doesn't even make sense, a T-Rex can't swim. Now maybe if it was Godzilla I could believe it.

robtotten said:

Brew day went perfect up until yeast pitching time. Then suddenly it gets very dark outside. A cloned tyrannosaurus rex has escaped the Jurrasic Park Island, swam to the states, hitch hiked Kentucky and is now towering over me. He bites me in half, and swallows everything from the waist up. Except, of course, the kidneys, appendix and miscellaneous guts that slipped out during the bite. That was going to be a good beer, too.

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Never let Jeff Goldblum brew with you. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Getting lit and tripping over my burner lighting myself on fire then falling head first into my boiling wort and slowly drowning while be being burned alive and my head boiled at the same time.

Thats what I call a Dead Guy clone.