Worst Experience of Home Brewing

As a newcomer to this obsession of home brewing, it's nice to get on here and here about mistakes that all the experienced people have made and make little "don't do" notes.

What's been your worst experience in home brewing and what caused it? Hopefully this will pull out some good stories

 

hmm...

1. first batch i had the capper break
2. chocolate extra stout isn't carbing as quickly as other batches, i've probably drank 5-6 bottles of unready beer already
3. picked up all my materials for my first AG at the LHBS but forgot to get them ground...used a food processor but still missed my target OG by 7 thousandths of a point...

 

Running out of homebrew - poor planning / increased consumption.

 

Brewed all day with my buddies and got to the last batch. Hooked up the wort chiller, made sure it was running well into the sanke and starteed doing some clean up. The last batch was a stout that my friend was trying to make for the third time because one little thing screwed up each of the first two batches.


Well........ we went to check on the progress and that is when we noticed that a valve had been left open on his fermenter! We lost half the batch down his driveway and are now calling it "Gutter Stout."

Sometimes it's the simplest thing that'll get ya. But then again, I'm sure it was a mistake that led to the whole discovery of beer anyway!

 

All my friends like to come drink my beer. I think it is caused by them thinking it is free since I make it instead of having to buy it. And it is also pretty damn good if I do say so myself. And that is about as negative as my home brewing has got.

 

First batch was fantastic, but I drank most of it before it fully matured. By 6 weeks after brewing, I had only a 12 pack left. And damn was it good! I wished that I had waited till the 6 week mark to START drinking it. Oh yeah, and save a 6 pack for a few months from each batch just to see how it ages!

 

Here's mine- I don't use heatsticks anymore.........

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/my-worst-brew-day-ever-10606/

 

Four pounds of flaked rye in a 10 pound mash, no rice hulls. Ever seen a 14-pound bran muffin?

 

Bottling my first batch I developed a leak around the spigot that I couldn't get stopped so we had to bottle as fast as possible. Only lost about a bottle's worth of beer and we had the whole batch done in less than 15 minutes.

 

LOL uh no, but SWMBO has digestive problems so if you're saying you now have Fibeer, I know someone who may be interested..

 

1st batch ever: Sanitized carboy before boil, but left 1 gallon of one-step in the carboy. When transferring wort, I was so zealous to get it into the carboy that I neglected to empty it of the gallon of sanitizer water.

 

Leaving my extremely full kettle to go get something from the house. I come back and my kettle looks like Mt. Fuji with wort exploding out of it! Damn that was a sticky mess.

 

I got 2 cases of 22 ounce bottles from my neighbor, 1 was new and the other had bottles that were just thrown in there after they were drunk, not even washed out. In my haste, I threw the wrong case in the dishwasher to sanitize before I went to bed. Bottled a batch the next day, and sure enough, as I was filling them, I noticed that there was all sorts of crap swirling around in about 4 or 5 of them. Fortunately I caught the rest of them and hand cleaned and sanitized them, but had to dump the others. No fun dumping good beer.

 

i shattered the glass top on a stove doing my first brewing experience. The weight of 3 gallons on a burner that was hot for a long time meant the slight design flaw in the stove became very, very noticeable.

 

Got a horrible acetobacter infection last year. Got to about 20 gallons of my beer. Very sad.

 

Because you were stupid you blame the equipment? That's just stupid.

 

My second batch was a blueberry ale. After three weeks no carbonation. Four weeks no carbonation. So i just left them in my closet for about 2 months, until it was time to move out. My brother is helping me move and says, whats all this beer, so i say its beer that didn't carbonate for some reason. So i take one out, and with all my recently washed clothes just packed into a big duffle bag by my feet pop one open. Beer shoots out with such force that the bottle literally thrust across the room, emptying a full bottle onto my clean clothes. Thinking back I didn't stir the priming sugar at all. About 2/3 of them hard no carbonation at all. The other ones were so carbonated every last drop would shoot out of them when opened.

Stir your priming sugar

 

I made mead last summer and a huge swarm of honeybees came into my basement from my neighbors hives. I freaked we're talking what seemed like a thousand bees everywhere with in 30 seconds. They were allover the flourescent lights and buzzing in my ears etc. They scared me but they didn't sting me they just kind of realized the boiling honey wasn't anything they could get and left.
Since then I have become beekeeper. The meade is delicious. I was brewing a bock today and a lone yellow jacket came in to my basement and reminded me of that honeybee brewing experience. It was nuts Virginia Wolf

 

Infection running rampant through the kegorator, has thrown me off brewing for 10 months now as I don't want to make something just to have it turn out infected...

 

Fermented a hefeweizen at about 90F. It was a phenol bomb.

I have since rebrewed that style a few times. It is much better at 62F.

Eric

 

I think we have a winner.

 

I started boiling water for extract & did not have any muslin bags
had a Honey Porter that didn't carbonate enough
Worst is when ran out of propane & had to finish on stove top.

__________________
Nutz4daff
NJHOPZ
http://www.njhopz.com

Primary: Imperial Chocolate Pumpkin Porter
Secondary:empty
Bottled: Coconut Cream Stout

 

I'll tell you my story. It was 2003. Lord of the Rings was ruling the box office, we lost the Columbia in a tragic accident, Iraq was a "Mission Accomplished," the WHO announced that they had successfully contained the SARS virus, and I was attempting my first all-grain batch. It went terribly. I overshot my strike temp because I followed Papazian's strike temp calc method. I was using a copper slotted manifold that had slots that were too big and was clogging up. I was attempting it on a work night. At 1AM, I was finally done with my batch. It weighed in at 40% efficiency. If that weren't bad enough, the astringency was terrible and ruined the beer. That kept me from doing another all-grain batch for years but I'm glad I gave it another chance. My next all-grain batch was fantastic.

 

What do you use muslin bags for?

 

I wanted to add some sweetened condensed milk to a stout. I had simmered the SCM until it had caramelized and then let it cool. The stout was going great and I dumped in the two cans of SCM and stirred during the boil. They never dissolved and when I drained the chilled wort the were burnt to the bottom of the pot. I let it ferment out but it was so charred and astringent I gave it to the fish in lake Michigan.

 

Probably for steeping grains but I had the same question.

 

One of my early all-grains I made an Oktoberfest. It was my first (and only) decoction. Everything went well, albeit a very long brew day with to many samplings along the way. When it came time to chill I put it in my bathtub and started the water running. About this time my wife came home with dinner.

About halfway through eating, I realized I'd never turned the water off. I ran to the bathroom to discover my brewpot floating sideways (with the lid still magically on). When I opened it up hoping for a good seal from my lid, I discovered the volume of liquid had doubled. I debated boiling it down, but couldn't bring myself to drink bathtub-water laden beer. It went to the garden.

I brewed the recipe again the next day and it turned out stellar. It's still the only batch I've dumped pre-ferment. And I only dumped one post-ferment.

Also, that recipe got lost in a hard drive crash. All my other recipes were recovered without issue, but that one disappeared somehow.

 

brewed a batch with a friend. he was aerating the bucket after pitching the yeast. bucket slips out of his hands and spins wildly before toppling onto its side. 5.5 gal of wort dumped on floor. that is a large volume of liquid on the floor in a small apartment!! that was his first and last brewing experience...:cross:

 

Fishing out that [email protected] rubber grommet because I put the airlock on while the lid is over the fermentor. Melting that [email protected] rubber grommet because I "got smart" the next time and put the airlock on while over the counter which happens to conveniently tilt towards a then still very hot burner.