ltwhiskers
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- Joined
- Jan 6, 2014
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- 57
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Used dish detergent to clean my bottles and bucket for my first brew. Soapyest tasting pilsner ever.
Ouch! Bottle bombs? What did you do?Last year I decided to make some 1 gallon experimental batches. I accounted for everything on brew day, but then came bottling day. On my second-to-last bottle I realized I'd gone through the motions and used the same amount of priming sugar I used in my 5 gallon batches.
How did you happen to get raw wheat directly from a farm? That is a bit unusual for most people. Few folks these days have access to a farm like that. While it is a nice thing to be able to do that, it's definitely atypical.
To be fair, I think that most brewing books and other resources assume you are getting malt from a source such as a homebrewing store, where you would have to ask for unmalted grain specifically. While unmalted wheat is sometimes used in brewing - mostly for lambics - you would normally use it as an adjunct, about half of the grain bill at most, and never as the entire grist. Even with malted wheat, you would normally have at least 40% of the grain bill as barley malt in a weizen, as wheat malt is hard to sparge (no hulls - you would need to add rice hulls to form the grain bed) and generally has low diastatic power (60-90° Lintner - enough to self-convert, but still lower than most malted barley).
My worst mistake? Well, yesterday I began bottling a porter before taking a hydrometer reading. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Except that, as it turns out, the fermentation had stuck at a gravity of 1.025, about fifteen points above the expected FG... I had to pour the entire batch back into the fermenter and hope I didn't get an infection or excessively aerate it... not such a terrible mistake, perhaps, but an embarrassing one to be sure.
Ouch! Bottle bombs? What did you do?
Used dish detergent to clean my bottles and bucket for my first brew. Soapyest tasting pilsner ever.
I collect all my cooling water. You just need to pay attention!First brew using my new DIY immersion chiller. I was super excited, and had done a bunch of research looking for advice, and one tidbit that seemed like a good idea was saving the first few gallons of hot water to use for cleaning. So, I set the exit hose to drain into an empty 7g pot I had, and walk away to get my bucket sanitized. After getting starsan all over everything, I go back and sit on the couch and start watching TV or playing a game or reading HBT or something, while I wait for the wort to chill. As I was sitting there relaxing after a long morning of brewing, I notice an odd trickling sound coming from the kitchen. OH CRAP!!! I walk in to water overflowing across the entire floor, under the stove, under the fridge, it actually got under the wall trim and had soacked some of the carpet in the living room... It took over an hour to soak up everything and get things back in order, and by the end of it was was anything but relaxed. The only thing that save me was that this is only 1 of 2 times SWMBO was gone while I was brewing, so I was able to get all the evidence cleaned up, and to this day she still doesn't know that I made such a huge mess. It would not have gone over well.
Now, I just drain into the sink.
I generally don't use soap for cleaning my brewing equipment (if you clean it with hot water right away, you don't need to), but I think you are okay if you do. I do clean my beer glasses with soap, which I hear lots of people say is a no-no. I do think you can rinse all the soap and perfumes off of whatever you wash. I probably wouldn't soak plastic things with perfumed dish soap for a long time for fear of leaching the perfumes into the plastic, but glass and stainless steel I would have no problem using soap on.Curious on this, I always clean with dish soap before sanitizing everything but I'm very liberal with the rinse water... Never had issues from it.
28grams in an ounce
16oz to a pound.
Made the mistake of weighing out 28oz pounds once....
Lets just say I knew something was wrong when I got a 102% brewhouse efficiency!
Always check to ensure mash tun valve is closed before dumping in strike water. Trust me on this one.
I was using the brew hauler to move a glass carboy full of American IPA. I had not fastened the brew hauler to the carboy properly, and dropped it from about 2 feet on to my hard tile floor. The entire glass carboy and 5.5 gallons of beer and trub went all over my kitchen. Worst. Mess. Ever.
I actually brought the hose in from outside and sprayed out the whole place. It took 2 days to clean. I had to get underneath the cabinets, move the stove out from its spot, and move the refrigerator. Plus I lost an entire batch of beer. I'm never using the brew hauler, or glass carboys again. Just grab it with your hands and grab it tightly.
28grams in an ounce
16oz to a pound.
Made the mistake of weighing out 28oz pounds once....
Lets just say I knew something was wrong when I got a 102% brewhouse efficiency!
Yesterday I bottled my Simcoe/Amarillo IPA. I dry hopped into the primary without a bag (no issue) and I also did not remember to at least chill it to precipitate the hop debris.
Attempted the mesh bag over the autosiphon but that clogged up pretty quickly
Long story short....about 1 gallon of crap left in the bottling bucket that was just to murky to bottle.
Most of my brewing mistakes happen towards the end of the brewday. I'm sure you can all figure out why. I've forgotten to take OG readings on multiple occasions. I almost always forget to vorlauf. The worst was probably the time I was helping a friend make an extract, partial boil DIPA. We put the kettle in the bathtub to cool it, turned on the water, went outside, and forgot about it. The water got high enough to float the kettle and tip it over, thus ending the brew day.
We put the kettle in the bathtub to cool it, turned on the water, went outside, and forgot about it. The water got high enough to float the kettle and tip it over, thus ending the brew day.
I have forgotten Irish moss so many times that now I just don't use it.
Put my carboys in my fermentation fridge and set it for 62 degrees. Plugged the fridge into a regular outlet instead of the temp controller. Next morning the carboys were at 33 degrees.
A few weeks ago I was adding oak chips I soaked in whisky to my Carboy and accidentally dropped the spoon in. If the beer turns out to be really good I'm going to send it to contest with spoon under special ingredients
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Grommet issues seem to plague this place. Am I the only one who's seen buckets with a large hole drilled for using a conical rubber bung?Did something similar but with a rubber grommet. Lost the original rubber grommet to my fermenting bucket, got a replacement that would suffice. Was pushing the airlock into the grommet and POP!, pushed the damn grommet through the lid. Was then stuck with the grommet on one side of the lid and the airlock on the other. Had to just wiggle the grommet off the airlock and it fell into the (soon to be) hard cider. I laughed my ass off because it topped off the whole first-time-making hard cider experience...
That gave birth to the first, and hopefully last, batch of Grommet's Hard Apple Cider...
Grommet issues seem to plague this place. Am I the only one who's seen buckets with a large hole drilled for using a conical rubber bung?
I have done that too. But I actually have three type of fermenters: Carboys, and buckets with grommets and bung holes.
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