worst beer you ever made

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Worst for me was what I called a "Honey Stout". I bottled it before it had finished fermenting and had two bottle-bombs. Aside from that, it ended up tasting like a dark malty mead because of all the honey I added. I still have about a case left of it and crack one open every few weeks. Getting better but it has been aging for nearly 9 months!
 
Worst fermented beverage overall - My first cider. Fermented at about 80 with a Belgian ale yeast. Bananas and bandaids everywhere.

Worst beer - a recipe I formulated for a coffee stout. Turned out to be more like a brown ale with some very harsh coffee flavor. Gave away a bunch to a friend, but I wish I still had a few to try again and see if it progressed...
 
Dumped a batch for the first time ever a week or two ago... it was just plain horrible. Wanted to make a Maple Cream Ale and I was going to use SanFran lager for the yeast due to the fact it's meant for higher-than-normal-lager temperatures... but one of the guys at the LHBS who, no matter what I say I'm doing, will give a suggestion of something "better" to use. So he made sure I bought the Southern Germany lager (I've never made an ale with lager yeast so I guess I was tentative.) Tried fermenting it at the temperature I was going to keep the SanFran lager at (65*F) but the S. Germany yeast were not happy about that. MAD amounts of sulfur, esters and phenols covered up anything that even remotely tasted like beer or maple.

Four months later it still was not drinkable and I mean painfully undrinkable: as soon as I would take a sample my stomach would start to hurt and (strangely enough) the muscles in my shoulders would wrench and tighten super hard almost like the beer was a damn neurotoxin!!

So yeah, I attempted beer and got hazardous waste... definitely my worst "beer."
 
my attempt at a raspberry ale. split a brown and added blueberry puree to half and razz to the other. the blueberry turned out good, but the razz tasted horrible. i still have most of it, but i just don't see it aging out.
 
Worst beer I have made so far has been an Apricot Blonde Ale. brewed the base blonde ale and it came out marvelous, but everything went down hill from there. I used 3.5 lbs of DRIED apricots in the secondary, instead of FRESH apricots. That means I added about 4x more frcutose than I meant to, which gave the beer nasty fusel taste. Also, the apriocts i sued had been treated with sulphur dioxide, which (you guessed it) made the beer stink of rotten eggs.
 
My Mom got me a brewcraft kit "American Wheat". It was a hopped extract kit with yeast taped on the can. I thought I would just brew it anyway, it was a gift after all.

I think it attenuated about halfway and the beer color had a purply blue tinge to it. SRM of at least 13. Not sure exactly what happened, but it tasted like sugar mixed into Old E.

I still drank all of it and so did my friends. This was about 4 years ago. Now, I am not sure what I would have done to it, but drinking it would not be high on the list.
 
I only had one batch that was awful so far..my Belgian Double WIT...a friend with an educated palate put it this way... "this sh*t tastes like ashy pennies" ....needless to say, I drank the whole batch.
 
A chocolate coffee stout, my 3rd or 4th batch ever and first attempt at recipe formulation. I had no idea what I was doing and it was pretty nasty. I kept hoping that it would come around but after 8 or 9 months in the bottle I dumped it all down the drain but a sixer. I popped one open here and there and it was getting better but still not good. Finally a month or two ago I found one (my second to last) and decided to pop it open. Expecting it to be yet another drain pour I found that it was actually pretty damn good, after only 3 years in the bottle!
 
What I wanted: a subtly spiced cherry Dubbel. What I got: some inky black cinnamon-flavored thing.

It's still very strange tasting.

Lessons learned: plug your recipe into BeerSmith to make sure the color is right, chocolate malt usually doesn't taste like chocolate, spicing is something to be done carefully, roasted malt doesn't belong in a Dubbel, don't promise everyone you know a bottle of Christmas beer without tasting it first, etc.
 
aside from an infected porter, my worst brew would be my "maibock", which is really more of a regular bock at 1.074 and pretty dark.

anyway, it was a partial mash (9lb grain) and one of my first recipes. Little of this plus a little of that equals a lot of crap.

The biggest problem was I mashed at 157 for some reason. I did make a starter but it still only got down to about 1.022. so, it's very sweet. it's still on tap actually (brewed on 1/18/2010) and it's starting to get a bit better. Still can't drink more than 12oz at a time before it gets overwhelming.
 
My worst was when my current roommate was trying to get back into brewing, and on a Friday, he said "Let's go to the LHBS and brew tomorrow!", so we bought extract from the LHBS. Any time I've bought extract, dry or liquid, from the LHBS, the result has been terrible, and this one was no different. IPA that tasted more like medicine than anything...dumped it out. We haven't had any sanitization problems in our online extract/AG batches either. Roommate's brew turned out terrible too.
 
I brewed a recipe I was working on, figured it was solid but due to my inability to do basic math and a slip up when weighing the hops it turned out horrible. It was a rye pale ale that was waaay low on 2-row resulting in a 1.040 OG, it was about 50/50 2-row and rye and had 2 oz magnum at 60 min, and 1 oz at 30, 15 and flameout of not cascade pellet as I thought, but more magnum, last time I label and seal the hops after hitting the homebrew!

I was thinking it would be a 1.058 beer with decent hop bitter and aroma from the cascade, instead I got a weak beer that was crazy bitter, I had to cut it with other beers to finish that keg.
 
I got one of those Sam Adams seasonal packs a couple of years ago. There was a fruit wheat in there which was terrible! I think it was a Cherry Wheat.
 
My worst was easily when I found a couple cans of old mr. beer extract and decided to give it a whirl with some fresh hops and yeast. I made two batches in one night and added raspberries to one of them. Both turned out disgusting, I mean completely undrinkable. The extract must have been extremely old and oxidized or something. Dumped them all.

No big loss at least.
 
IrishBrew said:
I'd say my worst was my first. It was an Irish Red extract kit that came with my brewing equipment. To put it in perspective, it had the bitterness of an IIPA without any of the hop flavor or aroma and no malt character to back it up. It was a bit like licking stale hop pellets.
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Roughly the same experience here. Got an amber ale kit with my brewing gear and it didn't come out too good.

It's been in bottles for about a month now and it's still bitter as heck and has no other real flavor or aroma.
 
Back in the day when the recipe was 1 can of Malt Extract from the grocery store, 5 pounds of white sugar and a cake of baker's yeast.

Yummy!
 
Captain_Bigelow said:
I got one of those Sam Adams seasonal packs a couple of years ago. There was a fruit wheat in there which was terrible! I think it was a Cherry Wheat.
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wrong thread, lol


cenla said:
Roughly the same experience here. Got an amber ale kit with my brewing gear and it didn't come out too good.

It's been in bottles for about a month now and it's still bitter as heck and has no other real flavor or aroma.
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I wonder why this is. My buddy's first beer was an amber kit, overly hopped as well.
 
I saw someone else that did the same dumb thing I did.

My first cider is only now drinkable after nearly a year. I made this with hefe yeast. The smell was well, we all know about Rhino Farts. So I was forced to relocate for primary ferm to the garage, and it was hot, really HOT as in 90's HOT!

As for beers I have never had any major failures some better than others.
 
cfonnes said:
Why would anyone lick a stale hop pellet?
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Even a stale hop pellet needs love.

I had two back to back batches (Kolsch and APA) this winter that I and everyone who I allowed to sample them called "Death" Brews.

Different grain bills and yeasts but came out tasting the same.

Only thing I could come up with was the 2 big snowstorms we had affected mineral levels in my well water - I use half spring , half tap water in my brewing.
 
I've got an Alt Bier I made that has developed a funky licorice background taste. It seems to be getting worse with age.
 
My worst beer was about 4 years ago. My daughter asked me to make a root beer flavored beer. So I used a bottle of root beer extract, used to make 4 gallons of root beer. I knew getting it sweet enough would be hard since the yeast would want to eat the sugars. I used lots of carmelized malts because I heard they leave more sugars behind the yeast will not eat. I also picked out the least efficient strain of yeast I could find. Added 2 lbs of lactose because I was told yeast would not touch it. The beer turned out BAD! It was interesting but bad.

Bruce
 
Well the lavender beer was just not good, but not bad. My first attempt at a brandywine style extract ended up tasting like syrup-but not horrible.

The worst thing I've ever made in my life (food wise) was an attempt at a red beer, using 2 row hops and about 1 pound of purple sticky rice, cooked up at added to the mash.

ended up with a fairly dark purplish wort, and the longer it sat, the more it tasted smelled like vomit. (not sulfer rhino farts, like a frat boy had just puked in the carboy). Racked it from primary to secondary and get it a month in the secondary and it just got worse and worse.

Couldn't even hold my nose and try a sip--just smelled too bad.
 
bonsai4tim said:
Well the lavender beer was just not good, but not bad. My first attempt at a brandywine style extract ended up tasting like syrup-but not horrible.

The worst thing I've ever made in my life (food wise) was an attempt at a red beer, using 2 row hops and about 1 pound of purple sticky rice, cooked up at added to the mash.

ended up with a fairly dark purplish wort, and the longer it sat, the more it tasted smelled like vomit. (not sulfer rhino farts, like a frat boy had just puked in the carboy). Racked it from primary to secondary and get it a month in the secondary and it just got worse and worse.

Couldn't even hold my nose and try a sip--just smelled too bad.
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Cripes, I chucked a bit reading the description, I dont even know what the heck "purple sticky rice" is but I may scratch it off the bucket list just to be safe. :drunk:
 
i made (what i thought might be ) an english brown from a recipe i thought up out of thin air. finally finished the last bottle 1.5 years later ( yes, alcohol was involved when i was coming up with the recipe ). still bad; no aging out nicely
 
So far, the scottish export in my sig is the worst. No matter how many posts I read about going light on the oak, I guess I still had to learn that lesson myself. Maybe in a few years it won't taste like chewing on a wood plank.
 
Pilsner Urquell clone, way too hoppy with sulfur odors lingering. Yuck.


The worst beer I've ever attempted to drink was 21st Amendment Watermelon crap. Undrinkable smelled like the dogs rear end on a bad day, wife refused to even take a sip.
 
Hopefully I never have a bad beer although I expect to. First batch gets bottled in two weeks. Hopefully I'm not back here in a month talking about my horrible oatmeal stout.
 
Sorry to say, but you'll brew a bad batch. We all do. Question is, can you drink a bad batch? It took me a few months to down my awful amber (not on purpose) Wit.
 
Crappy lawnmower cream. Didn't mash properly and it tasted f'n terrible - way too much malt taste. If anything I learned more about mashing so it wasn't a total loss but the beer sucked.
 
SW Blue Clone, I'm not sure if it's the clone I made or that fact that I can only drink that stuff on tap......
 
My worst batch was my first attempt at cider.

I just got a couple bottles of apple juice (preservative free) from the store and dumped them in a sanitized carboy with some champagne yeast. When I bottled it, I should have known that it was going to taste like crap. Sulfur taste out the yin-yang.

My fiance described it best "It tastes like dying Easter eggs."

That batch was definitely a dumper, I couldn't bring myself to waste space and store it any longer. I've been scared to try another cider ever since.
 
Oh, I thought of another.

My second beer was an amber ale that I thought would be inspired by fat tire, this was before I knew that they didn't actually use Belgian yeast in their beer. This was also before I knew that less is more in terms of specialty grains, especially when it comes to biscuit malt.

Basically it just taste like a mess, and sort of cinnamon like, kind of like eating a cinnabon that has been left on the bottom of a trashcan. Everyone else seems to like it though, for some reason.
 
motobrewer said:
I wonder why this is. My buddy's first beer was an amber kit, overly hopped as well.
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Hmmm. Are we ordering the same kit? Mine was a midwestern Autumn Amber Ale. I'm beginning to think that part of the problem of my beer is in the water. Tap water out here is fairly hard and has a weird aftertaste that I believe is intensifying beer bitterness.
 
Year and a half ago I decided to get back into homebrewing after a 9 year gap. Ordered a Barley Crusher and didn't get it before the weekend I intended to brew. But I REALLY wanted to brew and had a rolling pin, so I tried to crush using the pin. Horrible efficiency and thus WAY overhopped. Just bitter, that's it. Still have a sixer of it (why I'm not sure).
 

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