Dumbest mistake.

What's the Dumbest mistake you've ever made whilst doing a brew?

Last one I did I got the wort into the kettle and realised I'd forgot to put my hop stopper in!!!

My first brew, I didn't put any liquid in the airlock. I was wondering how on earth people were managing to count the bubbles per minute with ANY accuracy, but I was giving it my best!!

After a couple hours of bubbling, I figured it out

Check out my bank account...one could say that getting into brewing to begin with wasn't very bright.

Seriously...um...bottling my mango-peach wit before all the extra sugar from the fruit had fermented out, thus making every single bottling into a major gusher.

I was delaying brewday on a beer for a reason which escaped me at the time... I had all my ingredients, etc. so I figured what the heck let's brew.

When I went to cool my wort, I remembered why I was waiting. I just ordered my immersion chiller and it hadn't been delivered yet. So I had an entire 5 gal brew that I had to cool in a cold-water bath. I had to change the water several times and after about 1.5 hours of this, decided just to put a lid on it and go to sleep. I racked and pitched in the morning when it finally cooled.

Turns out, it was still a pretty darned good brew.

I ate a bowl of dumb flakes for breakfast one day. Their anti-nutritional value caused me to utterly lose track of time. This time-space void caused me to bottle my bock about a week and a half early in a...um...scientific experiment in bottle bombs.

I just recently dumped the wort into my primary bucket, not realizing that the spout was open. Oops.

The guy at the LHBS told me that he once mistakenly used his bucket of sanitizer for top-off water. He uses Iodophor now, for the red color.........

You missed the post where I forgot to add malt to an extract brew.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=13759

My mistake is always to make beer whilst SHMBO is in the house. She is pregnant and cannot drink so can you imagine what happens when I spend hours on end brewing. This would not be as bad but we also have a small child and I am attempting to finish an extension on the house ready for the next child! ..."firing the hole!!!"

I, at one time, thought I had the boil over problem figured out. Read a lot about boil overs and thought that everybody else was full of baloney. In fact, I was so confident that I filled my brew pot about one inch below the top, all was well and I was laughing at myself until I added the hops. HOLY CRAP BATMAN...I had stuff flowing over like a gushing valcanoe. This was in the kitchen too. Crap went everywhere. I spent about as much time cleaning up as I did brewing. Lessons learned.

Mine would be putting exactly 10 gallons of beer in a 10 gallon bucket. Beer was everywhere.

Making an airlock with a plastic funnel but not allowing the epoxy on the lid to dry. That also made a mess everywhere.

Forgeting to drill the hole for the spigot and the airlock but realising it just after the wort finnished chilling.

Pouring cool wort into a fermentor with a hole in it. Pouring it back into the boiling pot sealing the inside of the fermentor with a plastic garbage bag and pouring the wort into the garbage bag. This decreased the volume of the bucket and of course when it started to brew it made a big mess.

texasgeorge said:

I was delaying brewday on a beer for a reason which escaped me at the time... I had all my ingredients, etc. so I figured what the heck let's brew.

When I went to cool my wort, I remembered why I was waiting. I just ordered my immersion chiller and it hadn't been delivered yet. So I had an entire 5 gal brew that I had to cool in a cold-water bath. I had to change the water several times and after about 1.5 hours of this, decided just to put a lid on it and go to sleep. I racked and pitched in the morning when it finally cooled.

Turns out, it was still a pretty darned good brew.

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Uhhhh...WTF? Dude, I chill every batch I've done using an icebath in my util sink. Sure as hell doesn't take 1.5 hrs! And my beers turn out pretty damned good, even though I've never use an immersion chiller.

Evan! said:

Uhhhh...WTF? Dude, I chill every batch I've done using an icebath in my util sink. Sure as hell doesn't take 1.5 hrs! And my beers turn out pretty damned good, even though I've never use an immersion chiller.

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Maybe his was a full volume boil in a shallow sink.

You know, it kind of kills the whole spirit of "we're all a bunch of idiots, let's all laugh about our mistakes together" when someone basically says "what the hell did you do that for, dude?" We KNOW our mistakes. We KNOW they're stupid.

Mine have been mostly ingredient-based (way too much coffee added to a stout, way more than I could filter effectively; think an episode of "Dirty Jobs"). But, I'm an idiot, I know that.

I realised I needed to put the hop stopper in my kettle1 minute after putting the hot wort in!

Don't ask me why but on an early extract brew, I decided to prime with Malto Dextrin.

It turned out quite flat.

I made a double IPA a couple months back which had 6 ounces of hop pellets in it. I was siphoning the wort out of the kettle into my brand new 6.5 gal glass carboy, trying to leave as many of the hops in the kettle as I could... for some reason that day I decided not to use a hop bag.

Anyway, first I tried putting the hop bag on the end of the siphon in the kettle, but that was killing the suction. So I decided to put the bag on the other end, INSIDE the carboy with the siphon hose flowing through it. Well after about 2 minutes of siphoning it occured to me that I had a bag full of hops and trub stuck inside my carboy!

It took me about another 20 minutes to slowly pull the bag up through the opening of the carboy and scoop the gunk out with my bare hand. Eventually I got the bag out, and the beer still turned out great!

^^^^
Funny
^^^^

Bird,

I wasn't saying "what did you do that for!?"...I was just noting that what he considered a "mistake" is what I do every single time. Not having the money to drop on an immersion chiller h'aint a "mistake", it's just a fact of life.

I think the problem was that he also didn't have any ice for the bath. It was just cold water, which isn't really that cold compared to a 33º ice bath.

ryser2k said:

I made a double IPA a couple months back which had 6 ounces of hop pellets in it. I was siphoning the wort out of the kettle into my brand new 6.5 gal glass carboy, trying to leave as many of the hops in the kettle as I could... for some reason that day I decided not to use a hop bag.

Anyway, first I tried putting the hop bag on the end of the siphon in the kettle, but that was killing the suction. So I decided to put the bag on the other end, INSIDE the carboy with the siphon hose flowing through it. Well after about 2 minutes of siphoning it occured to me that I had a bag full of hops and trub stuck inside my carboy!

It took me about another 20 minutes to slowly pull the bag up through the opening of the carboy and scoop the gunk out with my bare hand. Eventually I got the bag out, and the beer still turned out great!

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This one's awesome!

Once I was rinsing the bottling wand and short length of tubing connected to it by placing the end of the tubing tightly on the end of my sink-sprayer tube and turning on the hot water. It took approximately .2 seconds to realize the other end of the bottling wand was aimed directly at my crotch. Quite tender, it became.

monk

Monk said:

This one's awesome!

Once I was rinsing the bottling wand and short length of tubing connected to it by placing the end of the tubing tightly on the end of my sink-sprayer tube and turning on the hot water. It took approximately .2 seconds to realize the other end of the bottling wand was aimed directly at my crotch. Quite tender, it became.

monk

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Uhhh...wouldn't it necessitate you actually depressing the button on the end of the bottling wand for it to spray your crotchial area? Or is that what you did?

I continue to make this mistake: I sanitize my auto siphon by placing it in my 6.5 gallon bucket with strasan solution. I then continuously pump sanitizer through the siphon without holding the output end of the tubing. Like clockwork, about 45 seconds into this exercise, the business end points upward, usually towards my crotch. I give it a good pump and my lower midsection gets soaked. No lie, I have done this at least 5 times in the last 3 months. I do not consider myself a genius, and it is moments like this (and the look on my wife’s eyes afterwards) that makes me realize we have not evolved too far since apes.

The worst mistake was also the last time I was allowed to make a starter on the stove. We have an electric, flat surface stove. I walked away for what was intended to be a split second trip into the next room for something. It just so happened a classic episode of the Simpson’s was on (The Lingo science experiment one) 15 minutes later I caught a sniff of burning…
It took me a full week to clean up both burners, the one I was cooking on, and the one I moved the saturated pot to in an effort to end the situation.

On my second batch of beer, Black Helicopter Porter, my brother and I had gotten permission from one of the owners of the LHBS to come up on a Saturday morning and use his equipment to brew. Well, we got up there, prepped the equipment, got the water to temp, put in the grains, put in the extract, added hops, everything was fine.

But it was a nasty, warm, humid day (typical Houston weather) and we decided to come inside. Well, I had turned the heat up some because I was worried about it getting "too cold." I still didn't properly understand what temps were desirable or how to operate a propane burner, really.

So we go inside and are goofing off, chatting away, and about 10 minutes later, some guy walks in the front door and says, "Yer pot's boilin' over." We both jump up and go scampering outside to find a rather large black pool surrounding the bubbling over pot and burner. We joked that if it came out badly, we would change the name of the beer to Blackhawk Down.

Luckily, it's delicious. :rockin:

Evan! said:

Uhhh...wouldn't it necessitate you actually depressing the button on the end of the bottling wand for it to spray your crotchial area? Or is that what you did?

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No. When I rinse the wand I take the tip off and blast warm water through real quick like. If I left the tip on, it'd most likely blow it off. I guess that's another stupid thing I haven't done yet.

Monk said:

No. When I rinse the wand I take the tip off and blast warm water through real quick like. If I left the tip on, it'd most likely blow it off. I guess that's another stupid thing I haven't done yet.

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You just need to do it more. I'm sure you will in time.