What is the worst ingredient you have ever added?

I see many people have added odd/unusual things to their brews, one guy even added grass clippings. Now I can't imagine adding something like that to any of my brews, the most adventuresome ingredients I have added to this point are extra malts or sugars to bring up the abv. I did add some vanilla once but I managed to screw that up and it was indistinguishable. So bring it on let's see the worst you have done and what you were trying to accomplish with your addition.

 

I added dandelions to a batch of mead... turned out I was allergic to them.

 

That sucks.... hopefully someone still drank it.

 

I added locally picked raspberries to a raspberry red ale. The raspberries were so sour that I finally gave up and dumped the last 37 bottles because I couldn't face drinking that stuff.

 

How long ago was that? Have you tried it again?

 

The beer was made about 4 years ago. I kept trying it to see if the sour flavor would age out but it was permanent. I won't be trying it again with that variety of raspberries. Once burned......

 

The worst turned into one of the best.

White sage. While completely undrinkable at first, it turned into a competition winner 6-9 months later

 

serrano Chiles, for a Chile Stout. I like green chile and I like stout....but not in the same bottle.
Not drinkable, fortunately I only had the chile in a one gallon trial batch...it was however, great for pot roast!

 

Puréed pumpkin in the mash. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but that brew day was just a fiasco start to finish. The end product wasn't even drinkable. At all.


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

 

I had a friend from high school that was really into fruit beers and pumpkin ales etc. He would bring over his newest discoveries when it was his turn to buy beer. I never did like anything he ever brought. Of course this was around 20 years ago and selections were not what they are now. It was about that time we discovered The Upstream in Omaha, damn good scotch ale. Haven't been there in 5 years since he could no longer take care of himself due to Huntingtons disease.
It's too bad to, I think that he would have enjoyed home brewing and creating his own fruity recipes. I didn't discover home brewing until after he was diagnosed. ... after that 99% of his beer drinking days were over. No alcohol with the medicine.

 

1) Canned pumpkin, the sparge was a complete disaster. 2) Spruce tips, the finished product had way too much spruce. Never again to both of these.

 

How is white sage different from any other? What was the taste like when it aged? What was the base beer?

 

Saison was the base beer. White sage is very different than your typical herb garden sage, it's more perfumed, for lack of a better word.

https://www.google.com/search?q=whi...KKNWjyATQj4KoBw&ved=0CB8Qsxg&biw=1280&bih=887

Despite our best efforts and bench testing with small volumes and amounts of sage, when we scaled to the batch we ended up over-saging. Once the sage mellowed, balance happened and it's a good beer.

I however still can't bring myself to drink it, the memory of how bad it once was takes over, and I am sage scarred.

 

+1 on the canned pumpkin. I broke a plastic mash paddle trying to stir a pumpkin ale that I made.

 

I've added hatch chiles to a cream ale and to a smoked porter. The cream ale turned out great, the smoked porter I added too much smoked malt and it overpowered everything else.

EDIT: Just realized the thread is "worst" ingredient, not "weirdest" ingredient. I'd say the worst was the bad Amarillo I had that smelled and tasted like onions and garlic added to a DIPA. The biggest tragedy there was the big dose of Citra that was also added to that batch.

 

Yeah.... I don't think I could put the Christmas tree in my beer. :cross: As a kid of 8 or so I was sent off by my mother (she was/is craaaaazzzzy) to live in a logging work camp in western Oregon. The constant smell of evergreen pitch on the hands and clothes made doing anything other than a Christmas tree a big no no for me.
I have only tried pumpkin ale maybe 2 times and wasn't impressed. We're you following a recipe or experimenting?

 

Liquid Malt Extract!! Worst ingredient I ever used!! So glad I went to all grain! No more Twangy beers!

 

Alright. I see 2 guy here with chilies /peppers. What was the reason in the first place? (Love hot things, experiment, made it for cooking /recipes, etc) Would you do it again but change recipe?

 

The bottom line is that there is no faster way to create an undrinkable beer than using too much of spices, chiles, herbs, ect. Basically anything like that is extremely easy to overdo.

 

Guava into a brown ale. Dunno why I did it...

 

I made a ginger brown ale once. I couldn't stand it, coworkers couldn't get enough of it.

Tried to make a GF sorghum beer. It got infected or something. Astringent as hell. Only beer I ever dumped.

I sampled a plambic at the height of its ropy phase. Describing it as "tasting like vomit" doesn't begin to describe it. Three months later, it had passed and tasted fine. But 7 years later, I can still recall that flavor.

 

Yeah. I can still remember the "taste" of a certain time I had the flu, and was vomiting profusely.

That was years ago.

So yeah, a bad tasting beer can easily stick with you. To this day I can still remember the absolute bile taste of the the variety six pack of Saranac I bought 3 years ago. I don't even know how it could be considered beer, it was that bad. All of it.

 

I once made a dunkelweizen with I think it was 3638, the more subdued weizen strain, and it came out very plain. So i asked my LHBS owner for some advice, and he said to make a clove tincture to get some phenolics in there. I did (vodka and whole cloves steeped for a couple weeks), and measured some drops in a glass beforehand, but it was the still one of the worst beers I had ever made. It was like sucking on a clove with every sip

 

Feces Brand Feces. it made my beer taste like crap. next time I'm gonna try Poop! brand feces.

 

I tried to add some coriander to a summer ale, after reading that it provided a nice "citrus" flavor that would enhance the orange zest that I already had in the recipe. I put in the suggested amount, but it simply overpowered everything else.

 

Peanut butter extract. Gave the porter a bitter medicinally alcohol taste. It was a dumper

 

You always make me laugh

 

hell, I make me laugh!

 

There are only few good things to do with peanut butter. .... PB&J and cookies and I don't really like peanut butter cookies but I did date a girl that liked to make "grilled cheese" with it but she was crazy with a capital loony bin.

 

It got expensive having to buy a new jar of PB every few days when you're 20. Wasn't about to put that back in the kitchen cupboard after that.

 

Lavender the first time I used it I used way too much. It has taken several attempts but I finally got it nailed down. My wife's friends love it.

 

Brown sugar. Horrible. Watched a you tube vid of a guy with very different tastes. and apparently after all the yeast have eaten the sugar from the brown sugar, you're left with the taste of bitter molasses. It was my first brew and I'd be damned if I was going to dump it.

 

I added a pint of blackberry jam that failed to gel to a wheat beer. Not sure if the blackberry "syrup" or the fact that the ferment temp was about 80 was the reason it was undrinkable. Made me leery of additions, and helped me learn about temp control.

 

Candied Ginger. Put it in last years Christmas Ale. Just terrible. Won't ever touch that stuff again. Found it at Northern Brewer and thought "well this could be interesting".


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

 

Besides a certain relative of hops that I probably shouldn't mention on HBT, The worst thing was a large amount of molasses. I guess some people have done it successfully in MINUTE amounts, not the 4 oz I added to a 3 gallon batch :smack:

 

I have never used molasses for anything. ... after leaving home at about 11 or so I went to live with people who had race horses. ... molasses was always just part of horse feed of course spaghetti was also a couple of cans of tomato sauce some hamburger, salt and pepper. Although I have seen recipe with molasses in it. Not something that I want to try.

 

Yeah but you laughing doesn't hurt my shoulder!

 

I don't brew enough to justify dumping out 5 gallons of a batch if it sucks, so I'm usually pretty conservative on my experimentation. I've used pretty common stuff like chocolate, honey, chilies, spices, etc. and I really can't complain too much about anything. I did once dry-hop with a full ounce of Sorachi Ace in a green tea pale ale, and I feel like it overpowered everything else until about 2 months in.

 

Well is was interesting right? Still doesn't sound good.

 

Old hops