What was your worst brew day?

[JordanKnudson]

What has been your worst brew day ever? One of those days where nothing seems to go right; where after carefully planning a recipe and buying all the ingredients, your wort is boiling and you can't find your hops; where you mash in for a pilsner and by some black magic what goes into the fermentor is a stout (okay, so maybe this one's a stretch, but if you've ever done a partial boil with top up water, you might have felt like it was pretty real). I'll share my worst day. Feel free to post yours. Talk it out -- it's like beer therapy. Well, brewer therapy. I think they call beer therapy "alcoholism" or something like that.

Mine was yesterday. Some of it was us being too optimistic about certain things, some of it was just dumb [bad] luck, and some of it was just being dumb.

We decided to brew at a friend's place a short drive from our apartment. He has a backyard (which we do not), so we figured we would be able to break out the propane burner and do a full 10 gallon batch -- something we can't do at our current place. Our friend doesn't have any brewing equipment of his own, but his offer to let us use his space was appealing, so we hauled all of our equipment over there and got ready to make a big batch of our house pale ale.

It started off on the wrong foot by us arriving 2 hours late. "No big deal," we thought, and we got to work. We heated our strike water on the stovetop, not wanting to use up our propane before the boil. Turns out our buddy's stove doesn't put out nearly as much heat as what ours at home does, and so it took over an hour to get the water to temperature. When it was finally there (161F), we dumped it into our mash tun and added the grain. Our target mash temp was 153, but when I looked at the thermometer, it read only 142!!! I gave it a moment to see if it was still adjusting, but nothing. Luckily, our mash wasn't unforgivingly thin (about 1.45q/lb), so I boiled another gallon of water and added it in, reaching a mash temp of ~148-149. "Okay," I figured, "I know my mash tun will hold this temperature without problems, so we'll just try a lighter bodied version of this brew." We upped the mash time to 90 minutes to get full conversion. This actually worked, luckily, so we'll just have a thinner, drier pale ale at the end. We batch sparged, but didn't take into consideration the extra water we'd added in the mash, and so we reached our boil volume well before we had drained out our second runnings (we turned off the valve when the gravity of the runnings was still at 1.019 because we were already over our intended boil volume). So much for efficiency...

Then came the boil. Since we had arrived 2 hours late, and heating the strike water had taken much longer than usual, it was already dark out when we took our kettle to the burner (we had been doing the mash inside because, hey, it's winter in Chicago, you try keeping water hot for an hour in this weather). No more sun = quick and significant drop in temperature. In this cold, even our Blichmann burner had trouble boiling the wort. We had it dialed in to the hottest flame we could, but it was fighting against the near-zero outside temperature, and it turned out that the backyard was in a long wind tunnel created by the nearby Chicago river, so our flame was blowing around like crazy. It even got blown completely out...twice!! (This also meant that as we did get into the upper 100s, hot break material was continuously forming little-by-little for quite some time, which ended up meaning a ton of skimming). After a good 75 minutes, our wort finally began to intrepidly boil. This is when I realized I'd completely forgotten to add the first wort hops. So, a 60 minute addition it was. The rest of the boil went alright, luckily, and we added our last hops at flameout for a steep, and stepped inside to get warm.

It wasn't until the steep had been going for a good 10 minutes that I realized that I had forgotten to put the immersion chiller in during the boil. I raced back outside to see if perhaps I could just sanitize it and toss it in, but there was a bigger problem. I had hooked it up to the hose earlier, while waiting for the wort to boil. Out of sheer mindless habit (read: being an idiot), I had turned on the water to check the fittings for leaks. Now the water inside the hoses was frozen solid, and the hose was so stiff that I couldn't even move to chiller to the kettle (not that the water would have run at this point if could have). So, we decided to chill the wort in the snow. For anyone who is at this point wondering, "Hmmm, maybe I should try that, it sure would conserve water and it would be one less thing to clean," DON'T. It doesn't work. Sure, the cold made it hard to boil the wort. But don't think for a second that it was going to be helpful and cool it down for us when we actually needed it. We passed a good two hours sitting inside, eating pizza and cleaning the rest of the equipment, periodically going back out to kick more snow around the kettle where it had melted the old snow. Two hours. I took a temperature reading. 140F. Fuuuuuuu... We got all of the other equipment loaded into the car, re-sanitized our fermentors (why not, we didn't have anything else to do, and you can't be *too* sanitary), chatted for awhile. Another temperature reading. 120F. By this time, it was past midnight. We said screw it, dumped the wort into the fermentors (thanks to having to move it out of the snowbank, the hops and break material kicked back up, clogging the valve). We decided to wait to pitch the yeast. We gave the kettle a quick wipe (couldn't actually dump it because our friend's garbage disposal doesn't work), loaded it into the car along with the fermentors, and headed home.

The last part of this day might not have been so stressful if the rest of the day hadn't already had me on edge. We had two fermentors in the back of our mini-SUV. One was a plastic bucket. I like plastic buckets. The other was...you guessed it, a glass carboy. I DON'T like glass carboys. Too easy to break. I'll tell you now that it did indeed make the journey safely home, but if you've driven in Chicago at all this winter, you know that we have some of the worst potholes that we've had in years. And lots of them. Every little bump in the road, every little swerve to avoid a man-sized sinkhole, caused my neck to seize up in terror. I just knew that we were going to break that glass. The drive home seemed infinitely longer than the drive there earlier that day.

Ultimately, we made it home in one piece with just shy of 10 gallons of wort in our fermentors. I decided I'd rather pitch the yeast before bed and risk the slightly warmer temperatures (by the the wort was down around 90, certainly not ideal, but also not hot enough to kill the yeast) than wait until the morning and risk some other bug getting in there and taking over. This morning, I found the fermentors sitting happily at room temperature (mid-60s) and the yeast multiplying happily on top. My fingers are crossed, and I am hopeful, that this brew day where nothing went as planned will nonetheless turn out a decent beer.

 

[hedbutter]

I was visiting a friend who is also a brewer, and we spent all of Friday getting his 3 vessel system (2 coolers, 1 kettle) system set up and ready to go. We made it through the mash/sparge and, surprisingly as it was both of ours first time doing/being a part of all grain in a 3 vessel system, hit all of our numbers dead on. The only thing between us and our new-years brew was the boil. We put the pot on, and turn up the burner and its going, with the floating thermometer in there. I check it, we're at 170, going to steady. ~20 minutes go by I check it again, and notice liquid in the therm. Call my friend over (as I thought it was odd, but wasn't sure) and he says its not good at all. We pull the therm on put it in Tupperware, and find that the therm has cracked, and the beads weight it may or may not have leaked into the batch. After some research on what the beads are made out of, we decide to dump the batch. While we're pouring it out, there was easily 50 to a hundred little beads (and the wax that was one them) stuck to the bottom of the kettle.

TL;DR- Made it through the hard part, therm broke during the boil and had to dump the batch.

 

[kombat]

I've posted this story elsewhere in the past, so I'll just give the short version this time.

I was brewing a Rauchbier in my garage. 90 minute mash, 90 minute boil. Everything went fine, got the batch chilled, and was ready to rack into my carboy.

I've read enough horror stories on HBT about carboys breaking to make me pretty paranoid. I've read that the uneven "peaks-and-valleys" surface of concrete can exert pressure points on the bottom of a glass carboy, causing it to crack or break. So I never set my carboys directly on concrete. My basement and garage floors are both concrete, so I always lay down some cardboard or plywood first before setting down a carboy.

Anyway, on Rauchbier day, as my batch was chilling, I brought a carboy up from my basement, and grabbed a cardboard box from the recycling bin. The box was about the size and shape of the kind of box that ski boots or skates would come in. So, box on floor, carboy on box, start autosiphon to rack wort from kettle to carboy. I turned my attention back to finishing cleaning out my mash tun.

You can see where this is going. The box was plenty rigid to support an empty carboy. It even valiantly held a half-full carboy. In fact, it wasn't until the carboy was almost completely filled that the box finally gave way and collapsed unevenly, tipping the carboy onto my concrete garage floor. ka-BOOM! Sugary wort everywhere and 6 hours of my day wasted.

It was surprising how the carboy broke, and I can see why the things result in so many injuries. It wasn't like there were a whole bunch of consistently-sized pieces, there were a few huge, sharp chunks, and then thousands of tiny slivers and granules. Still wet with sweet, sticky wort, of course. The cleanup was agonizing, trying to collect all those pieces of glass, then pressure-washing the garage floor. And my poor yeast had been slowly warming up all morning getting ready for their meal. Back in the fridge, they'd have to wait another week.

I guess it could've been worse. At least I didn't get hurt. It was just so demoralizing putting all that time and effort into a batch and having it go away in just seconds.