How bad was your first home brew?

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I went to a buddies house and watched him brew an AG Blonde Ale. The next week and $1500 later I brewed a 10 gal. AG batch using a recipe that I got from my LHBS using my new 60qt pots, two of which have false bottoms, heated with 3 Blichman burners, circulated with 2 seperate March pumps (Brutus clone set-up), cooled with my plate chiller and fermented in my homemade chamber. I keged it up, force carbed and enjoyed the hell out of it served from the kegerator that I made from my wifes chest freezer...! I am now drinking my second batch. An IPA recipe that I got from this site, It's also very good. Thanks for all of the advice and the recipe that I got from this site. I have a Blonde Ale fermenting now and have an EdWort's Haus Ale planned next. I plan to put my new stir plate to use and do my first starter with that one.

I've got to go out and buy my wife a new freezer now...
 
Well, it was just 2 cans of LME, one hop flavored and one not, so you can probably guess how that tasted. I drank it, but it was nothing great. My second brew, a stout with steeping grains, was quite nice. In 30 batches, I'd say I've only had 2 that were really terrible.
 
Mine was one of those Brooklyn Brew Shop kits. The Tea & Toast, which is no longer made. It would have been good, if I knew what I were doing. However, I didn't, and it looked wrong. Cloudy, with...thingies...in it. It carbonated really well. Too well, in fact - when I opened my first bottle, I got some on the ceiling. I drank those first beers, knowing that they were sour, while at the same time disgusting, with stubborn pride. They were mistakes, yes, but they were my mistakes. I earned the right to be repulsed by my beer.

But, I was bound and determined to make this whole homebrewing thing work, so I didn't give up. Good thing, too - my IPA kit turned out wonderfully. My sixth, and subsequent batch is going to be my first all-grain, all-original beer. It will probably be awful.
 
Mine wasn't bad. It was a brewers best robust porter kit. I deviated from the directions a bit and added a lb of honey to it without really understanding what that would do. Turned out a little thin and watery and had a bit of a twangy flavor but not terrible. I've only ever made one undrinkable beer and that was because my fermenting bucket had a small crack in the bottom and it molded where some if the beer leaked out. Other than that everything has been at least drinkable even if some were less than stellar.
 
Husher said:
Mine was pretty horrific and I wanted to know if anyone else was as stubborn as I in keeping with the hobby.

My first brew was a coopers lager. My first mistake was I bought one that had expired a year earlier. Second mistake was that I followed instructions from CragTube on adding brown sugar instead of dextrose.

Don't get me wrong, I learned a lot about equipment and 'how-to's from CraigTube, but after that experience I decided his tastes in beer are very different than mine. Though I have done other things learned from him that worked out well.

Basically the beer tasked like horribly bitter molasses for what was probably a fine beer on it's own. And time would not heal it.

And stubbornness and the unwillingness to admin to the wife that I screwed it up somehow led me to drink my bitter mistakes one by one. And led to my first lesson in home brew: Do it right once before experimenting.

So What horrible mistakes have you drank?
Click to expand...

Nice honest question!

My 1st three batches way back around 1985 were terrible!!! Gave up trying after that. Refinanced the house and found out my well was contaminated with bacteria! When I was topping off the fermentation bucket I was adding bacteria!!! Fixed that problem and started brewing again around 1991.
 
My first (brewed with a buddy) was pretty heinous. It was the intro pale ale recipe from a book, I guess 'The Joy of Homebrewing.' It was pretty bad. Don't ever use the yeast pack on the bottom of a decade-old can of extract!!! Tasted like really gross apple cider. We drank all of it, and didn't get any help from friends, lol.
 
Used old extract,I believe. Also fermented too high,didnt know I used hops to "flavor" with doing only a 20 min 1 gallon boil using old extract( I believe) but I kinda was killing a step and simplifying so I kinda new it would flavor and bitter but not flavor to the extent it did. It was fruity-twangy and winey,I fermented too high not to mention,that was fruiter,so at first I actually though my beer was more like wine or something.

I probably also bottled too early,especially for fermenting too high( I was intentionally trying hard to keep temps over 70 deg . I didnt have much of a clue about hop flavoring at the time. It did turn out better over the course of the year though.Especially my Wheat-amarillo extract. It was pretty decent really. But I was very confused about what I made at first not to mention frustrated,turns out it was not all my fault,as it is suggested now, old extract can be twangy or cidery. I think its was more winey/fruity that could suggest the same thing as the twang thing for me. But the hops proabaly gave the fruity part,making it seem so fruity it was more like wine. I just remember,"This doesnt taste like beer" or at least beer that Ive ever had before.So I thought I failed and/or thought homebrew may just not be very good,but was very determined to figure it out,and with time, I did. Now I know.
 
My first was a Mr Beer, whatever came with the plastic bucket. It wasn't as bad as the next few beers which I refuse to dump but can't drink as they are from bad to worse.

But if it wasn't for Mr Beer as the first batch, I wouldn't have been drunk for the most part of May 2012 when I maxxed out two new credit cards to purchase a balls to the wall electric automated mobile all grain brewing setup with pumps, filters, kegs, keezer, etc. I even ripped down the guest house to replace it with a hops farm which apparently was not a great idea in hot DC weather unless you water them every once in a while. You live and learn I guess.
 
:mug:I started brewing about 20 years ago with a buddy. Only for about a year then marriage and work and kids put a stop to it. When i started back up about 2 years ago with a Mr. BEER my wife gave me for a Christmas gift it was on again. That brew was not good. I knew i could do better. U could call it a re-awakening.
 
I too started with Mr. Beer and my first brew was the Englishman's Nut Brown Ale.

I have fond memories of balmy summer evenings sitting in the beer garden at "the pear tree" on Causewayside, just across from Edinburgh uni, drinking various ales, including Newcastle brown from pint bottles, so I determined that my Mr. Beer Nut Brown was going to be a nostalgia enabling, liquid halcyon, time machine:ban::ban:

What I hadn't figured on was Osaka's end of summer, mid to late September 2011, heatwave kicking in and shoving the mercury up to well over 35 C in the shade in the daytime and only going down to lows of 27 C - 28 C at night. I'm pretty sure my wort production wasn't too bad as I had fervently read all the Mr. Beer instructions about 15 times. Had also read through as much of the pertinent stuff in John Palmer's online version as I could digest, but didn't seem to realize the importance of, and simplicity of cobbling together, a swamp cooler, so, after cooling the wort down to 21 C, pitching the S-04 I'd located at Tokyu hands, I put my LBK in the drawer of a steel filing cabinet in my garage. I think my average temp for initial fermentation was probably about 29 C:eek:. After about three days I managed to get a swamp cooler, of sorts, made up but it was already too late. I had also, at this point, found HBT and, after receiving the general consensus, was expecting a 2 gallon, fusel bomb laced, pile of liquid poo.

When I opened my first bottle, which amazingly enough I managed three weeks primary and three weeks in bottle plus a three day chill in the fridge (actually, now that I recall it wasn't amazing at all. I had been so dismayed by the prospects of how I thought that beer would turn out it was easy to just leave it the f@*k alone for all that time and move on to the next few brews) it actually didn't taste that bad. It poured with a decent amount of head, tasted a little thin, possibly metallic, with a hint of bubblegum, but didn't have that hot, burning alcohol, feel to it, that I could detect anyway :drunk: didn't produce any migraine type headaches and when I went to drink a Kirin Ichiban shibori afterwards(5%ABV) the Kirin tasted thin and watery after my own so I figured I must have hit about 5.5 to 6%.

Even my wife, who doesn't drink at all, said "it looks, tastes and smells like beer". Best mate was amazed that it was even that good. I was basically "Meh". Have made some good, some great, and some truly excellent brews since then with my most recent batches reaching far higher levels, due mostly to the wealth of info and help to be found here on HBT:mug::mug:

Managed to keep a couple of 1 litre bottles of that first brew ageing for a year and, although they did mellow slightly, it didn't really get much better.:D
 
My first was not good, I boiled the grain and drank it after a week in the carboy, it gave me the "runs". It was a Brewers Best Kit.
 
My first was decent, but had a few off flavors from too high of a ferm temp.

I still have an original bottle that I kept from 3 years back. Probably tastes terrible. :D
 
Considering my first homebrew was made in an open crock and consisted of blue ribbon hopped malt and a chunk of yeast from the bakery it wasn't that bad. LOL.

A little yeasty but it was beer and it was more to my liking than most of the canned and bottled stuff from the supermarket.

bosco
 
My first was pretty awful. All grain centennial blonde I tried doing on the stove, with a single 4g kettle. Well...I ended up sparging through a strainer and adding water to fill the carboy. Lets just say it tasted like extra watered down bud light.

Two bottles and it was spilled down the drain. Still have one bottle to remind me
 
My first homebrew has been one of the best beers I've made so far. I was disappointed at first because I didn't know English IPAs were not that hoppy, but as I learned more, I really appreciated it. It probably turned out well because I did everything exactly by the book and all of my equipment was brand new and clean. Probably also because it was a Charlie Papazian recipe.
 
Mine was pretty decent actually, it was a Hefe extract that I got from my LHBS and threw together with their directions. I was surprised how much my wife and I liked it. I still have a few bottle left beting that this was only 6 months or so ago.
 
My first batch wasnt very good. Doing little to no reading I came up with my own recipe based on the description of the flavors of the malts and what I thought sounded like a good mix. I didnt understand the portions of using specialty malts or using too many malts to create a muddled and horrible tasting brew. After that I really dug in and studied up on every aspect of the process I could. Brewed a 8% Abv Bog Myrtle Elderberry Pale Ale my 2nd batch a few weeks later, again my own recipe, and knocked it out of the park.
 
My first one got too warm on the first day of fermentation. When I realized this I got the temperature down quickly then fermented a little longer and did a secondary. I don't know how much it changed the taste but it was still very good.

My second was one of my favorites so far. (34 batches)

I have not made any yet that were bad. My worst I would still say was pretty good. It was an experiment running a small batch through the grains after getting the original wort drawn off. It was an IPA that was too weak and bitter. It has mellowed nicely with age.
 
After probably two+ years of reading and research, not to mention helping my dad for years as a kid, I jumped in head first. No kits, my first was a 1.102 OG imperial stout that sat on crown royal soaked oak chips for two weeks, has been in bottles two weeks, all taste test thus far have been great. The night I bottled it, I brewed a 1.132 OG barleywine that will sit in the carboy for the next six months, and bottles for another six. This weekend I have big plans for a IIPA brewed with local honey and Citra, Centennial and Cascade. Wish me luck!
 
My first was a two can no boil woodforde wherry kit. Lovely bitter, I'd recommend it to anyone.
 
My first two were partial mash kits from a local LHBS. Both turned out great and I remember thinking, this isn't so hard. Well, the cockyness bit me because my next two batches looked like 5 gallons of beer mixed with cottage cheese and stunk up my garage. No problems since as I leaned the importance of sanitation the hard way.
 
I brewed my first batch in Dec of 2001. A brown ale kit I bought myself for Christmas. My little brother and I were fairly well blown away at how well it turned out. So, I kept on!
 
My birthday followed the '94 earthquake so no stores were open. The LHBS had a bunch of dented LME cans on sale and my brother bought me one, that was it, a can of LME.... :eek:

After doing a lot of reading and spending a bunch of money I brewed my first batch and it was really good. The second, third and fourth batches got dumped due to using bleach as a sanitizer and not rinsing. I never gave up though and I'm still brewing today, it will be 20 years this January.....
 
I burnt the extract in my first batch and ended up with a burnt toast tasting amber ale. And second batch I had some bottle bombs and an otherwise band aid flavored beer (sanitized with bleach). I took a couple of years off doing my research and every beer since has been awesome.
 
My first was a one gallon all grain ipa kit from Brooklyn's brewing.

Mashed between 155 - 175.. fermented at 80 degrees, bottled after 9 days, and siphoned by mouth into bottles that were briefly rinsed with water.

Opened first bottle after day 4. My girlfriend (who bought me thr kit) and i split it.. she loved it.. or so she said. I thought that tasted like carbonated Vinegar. The rest of the bottles exploded up in my attic.

Luckily I found this site afterwards, did some research and did it right!
 
I also spent a lot of time reading and doing research before I tried the Dead Ringer ale from,northern brewer. I loved it! Everything I read preached about the importance of patience.

My son-in-law could not get over the fact that I had not sampled it until it was botted, conditioned, and stored cold for a week, but man was it worth it!:ban:
 
In high school I made my first batch with a Mr. Beer kit. It was pretty bad, but since we were in high school we choked it down.

Years later I started reading John Palmer's website during downtime at work, and got interested in homebrewing again. I bought a kit from my LHBS (SF Brewcraft) and my West Coast IPA turned out great! Haven't had a bad batch since the Mr. Beer.
 
My roommate brought home a Mr Beer kit that he gave his father the year before for Christmas. I've always wanted to brew so I said break out the kit. I ended up doing all the hard work and got the batch into the fermenter. After bottling and conditioning and chilling, we were greeted with a fizzy yellow banana bomb. I was hooked.

The next day I searched the net and found a LHBS, bought a 5 gallon starter kit. Several undrinkable batches were produced and consumed after that.

Now I am making great beer and ripping apart my own recipes.
 
My first beer was a hefeweizen that came out Amazing well. I did a few more extracts before switching to all grain. My worst beer was an ESB that tasted good but eventually over carbonated, I think due to poor mixing of the priming solution. I had a similar problem much later with the whitehouse honey ale that while delicious, didn't carbonate at all until about 8 weeks into bottling. By then I had poured most of them out. I now lightly stir in the bottling bucket with a sanitized racking cane.
 
making our first batch was a pain, we had thought that a camp stove would work as a burner...two hours and no boil later we brought it inside and had to split the wort into different containers to get it to boil on our kitchen range. i thought for sure that it wouldn't turn out well, but it ended up being really good! lesson learned and i went out and bought a bayou classic burner.
 
My first beer was pretty good. I didn't make one I didn't like for at least a few batches. I have only made one that was close to undrinkable. Oddly enough the one that turned out the worst was the exact same kit I made for my first beer.

I read this forum a lot before even trying to make beer.
 
glassbottom said:
making our first batch was a pain, we had thought that a camp stove would work as a burner...two hours and no boil later we brought it inside and had to split the wort into different containers to get it to boil on our kitchen range. i thought for sure that it wouldn't turn out well, but it ended up being really good! lesson learned and i went out and bought a bayou classic burner.
Click to expand...

You reminded me!! My first boil was a full boil and it took 2 hours to cool down. I immediately built an immersion chiller for my second batch. My second batch it took so long with my coil electric stove cooktop on HIGH that the burners all fried the wiring, and hot break boilover with burned malt on the surface marked the end of my stove.. A $700 new ceramic cooktop stove later, I bought a bayou classic burner and brew outside. :)
 
mine was the morebeer blonde ale. Turned out tinted almost light red not sure why. I am not a blonde ale fan. Turned out to be pretty good and other people really liked it.

2nd was the morebeer irish red ale. It is very good i think. still drinking them 5 weeks after bottling.

this time i brewed brewcraft's 80 shilling scottish ale. Its been in my primary for 6 days. Very excited to drink it. Not sure if i will buy from them again. yeast was expired 2 months. I know people say 6 months But being only a 3 batch veteran I did not want to have to worry if it will be good.
 
My first was a Irish Red Ale, it fermented hot, has that fusel alcohol taste to it, so we started cooking with it and it turns out that it makes a great cooking beer, 1 beer and some butter and some herbs in a frying pan with some chicken breast, makes for some fine eating.

Cheers :mug:
 

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