This thread is really just meant to put peoples minds at ease. I dont want to imply that sanitation is unimportant or that temp control doesnt matter but lets face it, beer is some pretty resilient stuff and often times the best things in life are found where you arent looking.
I see so many threads in the beginner forum where people are concerned that their beer is ruined (probably provoked by the infection thread) and they havent even tried it yet. The standard response is wait it out see what you get.
So what have you done wrong that you thought could ruin your beer but it ended up just fine?
Ill go first:
1) Used a thermometer that was reading off by about 10 degrees. Mashed two batches at about 165 before figuring it out.
2) Fermented a Hefe at about 85 degrees, with time the off flavors mellowed out.
3) Got way better efficiency than planned and ended up with a 1.072 beer. I only had one liquid yeast pack and no starter. Tossed it in and reached target FG in just a couple days.
4) Knocked the blow off tube cap off my fermenter while covering it up, didnt notice it for a couple days.
5) Cold Crashed a 10 gallon batch of Pale Ale and sucked about ¼ gallon of two week old starsan from my blow off bottle into each carboy.
6) Forgot to purge my carboy and proceeded to force carb it by shaking it, no doubt lots of oxygen was introduced.
7) Before I figured out how to siphon directly in to the beer out ball lock on my keg the damn hose curled up in the keg and stuck up above the beer level making an oxygen grabbing beer fountain.
8) Oaked an IPA with oak chips in a hop bag. The bag sank so I stuck some long tongs in to try and grab it, forgot to sanitize said tongs and they went all the way in including the pivot/spring deal.
9) Guy filling in at the home brew store screwed up my grain order and mixed in twice the base grain than I had intended so my specialties were essentially diluted. It was a Rye IPA and after some tweaking over several batches my favorite recipe is actually closer to the screwed up version than the intended version.
10) I made a late hop (massive amounts of late hop) IPA that almost got tossed (that would have been the mistake). After two weeks I shined the flashlight from my phone at the side of the carboy and it was puke green. I thought it was ruined, sampled and it was nasty, damn near tossed it then I remembered the threads on here telling people to wait it out, so I did. Transferred to secondary and let it sit for a couple more weeks. Turns out the green beer and nasty flavor was due to all the hop material floating around. After cold crashing it came back to the nice blood red color I was shooting for.
11) Ran out of sparge water so I had to heat up more, filled up the keg I use for warming the water but left the ball valve open so I essentially finished my sparge with cold water. I had already run about 5 gallons of hot water through though.
12) Brewing the winter I had my keggle outside side with the wort chiller running and sitting in a tub of water. I was shoveling snow into the tub and tossed a scoop a little too enthusiastically (had drank a lot of beer at that point
) and it went right into the almost fully cooled wort.
13) First time I used my new wort chiller I didnt check the hose clamps connecting the vinyl tube to the chiller and got a little extra wort from the leaking connection.
So what have you done that didn't lead to the end of the world, or at least that batch of beer?
I see so many threads in the beginner forum where people are concerned that their beer is ruined (probably provoked by the infection thread) and they havent even tried it yet. The standard response is wait it out see what you get.
So what have you done wrong that you thought could ruin your beer but it ended up just fine?
Ill go first:
1) Used a thermometer that was reading off by about 10 degrees. Mashed two batches at about 165 before figuring it out.
2) Fermented a Hefe at about 85 degrees, with time the off flavors mellowed out.
3) Got way better efficiency than planned and ended up with a 1.072 beer. I only had one liquid yeast pack and no starter. Tossed it in and reached target FG in just a couple days.
4) Knocked the blow off tube cap off my fermenter while covering it up, didnt notice it for a couple days.
5) Cold Crashed a 10 gallon batch of Pale Ale and sucked about ¼ gallon of two week old starsan from my blow off bottle into each carboy.
6) Forgot to purge my carboy and proceeded to force carb it by shaking it, no doubt lots of oxygen was introduced.
7) Before I figured out how to siphon directly in to the beer out ball lock on my keg the damn hose curled up in the keg and stuck up above the beer level making an oxygen grabbing beer fountain.
8) Oaked an IPA with oak chips in a hop bag. The bag sank so I stuck some long tongs in to try and grab it, forgot to sanitize said tongs and they went all the way in including the pivot/spring deal.
9) Guy filling in at the home brew store screwed up my grain order and mixed in twice the base grain than I had intended so my specialties were essentially diluted. It was a Rye IPA and after some tweaking over several batches my favorite recipe is actually closer to the screwed up version than the intended version.
10) I made a late hop (massive amounts of late hop) IPA that almost got tossed (that would have been the mistake). After two weeks I shined the flashlight from my phone at the side of the carboy and it was puke green. I thought it was ruined, sampled and it was nasty, damn near tossed it then I remembered the threads on here telling people to wait it out, so I did. Transferred to secondary and let it sit for a couple more weeks. Turns out the green beer and nasty flavor was due to all the hop material floating around. After cold crashing it came back to the nice blood red color I was shooting for.
11) Ran out of sparge water so I had to heat up more, filled up the keg I use for warming the water but left the ball valve open so I essentially finished my sparge with cold water. I had already run about 5 gallons of hot water through though.
12) Brewing the winter I had my keggle outside side with the wort chiller running and sitting in a tub of water. I was shoveling snow into the tub and tossed a scoop a little too enthusiastically (had drank a lot of beer at that point
) and it went right into the almost fully cooled wort. 13) First time I used my new wort chiller I didnt check the hose clamps connecting the vinyl tube to the chiller and got a little extra wort from the leaking connection.
So what have you done that didn't lead to the end of the world, or at least that batch of beer?
