Ever Dumped a Brew? Regrets?

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On brew number 82 and had to dump brew 78 a few months ago. Was a 3 crop creme ale and love that beer. When I was kegging I noticed a film layer on the top of the surface in the fermenter. I do 10 gallon batches and had to dump the first one. Taste was soso but smell was there. The second one was kegged a few weeks later and had some hints but not near as bad and is in my keezer now.
Not sure of what went wrong to this day. Must have picked up an infection in fermonster is my best guess.
 
I think I'm about to dump 5 gallons of cider. I just can not get past the sulphur smell and taste :( I had such high hopes for this batch, to...
 
i haven't read all the posts and haven't gotten to the second page......but my god their are alcohlics that would gladly take these dumpers from you, just need to figure out shipping.... a keg weighs ~40-50lb's...flat rate is $35 or so.....i need to try more of your dumpers....call me crazy, i'm curious what you call a dumper?
 
My first attempt at a marzen. After a series of glorious blonde ales, my confidence was brimming. I’ve never had a marzen/Oktoberfest style beer, I don’t think we have even a good example here in Australia.
I researched the perfect grain bill, ordered some fresh German hops, as well as some authentic fresh Oktoberfest liquid yeast.
Unfortunately living in rural Australia several days transit away from the source I think the liquid yeast was a bit tainted by the time it got here. Also at the time I was naive enough to not really understand pitch rates.
The marzen has since been referred to as the “fart beer”, due to the outrageous amount of sulphurous esters picked up during fermentation. I chalk it up to a learning experience and I definitely learned much from it, however the pain of watching as most of a keg absorbed itself into the front lawn is a constant reminder to not be overconfident and do my due diligence before trekking into untraveled waters.
 
I had a 5 gallon batch of sour I did with Roeselare. Waited 2 years, it never improved, or maybe it was me, just didn't taste like something I wanted to suffer through 5 gallons of. Not even sure I wanted to dump it on the lawn, emptied it behind the building at work...
 
day_trippr said:
I will confess I poured out the last third of my one and only keg of barley wine after a year of it lingering along in my 6 tap keezer. Finally just got tired of it, tbh...

Cheers!
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This happens to me on occasion with big beers. I end up bottling the left over beer and stick it in the fridge or basement and taste latter in life. I had a Kate The Great Imperial stout that I drank 4 years later, tasted damn fine too. Nowadays I only brew 3 gallons of Imperial beer, leave the 11 gallon batches for the IPAs, Pales, Amber ales. These get consumed quickly.
 
I always give a beer a fighting chance first but I have no problem dumping a batch if it takes a turn for the worse. I like to brew frequently so there is always more coming online behind it. I try to learn at least something from the experience and then move on.
 
I dumped my third batch, an all-grain hefe. It was also the last batch for which I did not take OG/FG readings.
I don’t know what went wrong to this day. My process has changed very little except obviously I can tell that fermentation has actually occurred without relying on simply the passage of two weeks.😆
Every bottle gushed like a volcano.
I’ve made 3 or 4 that I wasn’t exactly pleased with but still drank them. One was an ESB. Another was a red IPA. Nothing wrong exactly, just chalked up to poorly conceived recipes that looked good on paper but not in practice.
 
I know this is a somewhat old thread, but it’s what I needed to see.

Thinking about dumping a batch, which would be the third batch I’ve dumped. First was a wheat ale I tried adding blueberries to, didn’t let them ferment out, or it soured and ended up with gushers. Second was a lacto infected (I think) milk stout.

This one was my first attempt at a holiday spice beer. Brewed 3 gallons of a doppelbock (which was also my first attempt at a lager) and added WAY too much cinnamon (now I know you just need a sprinkle), so it has this odd cinnamon flavor, which isn’t terrible, but isn’t pleasant. The beer is drinkable, but not particularly enjoyable. Biggest issue is I currently only bottle condition (don’t have the space or $$ for kegging right now, can’t wait until I do though), and need to free up bottles so I can brew more. Maybe I’ll do what some have suggested and save a few bottles and let them age awhile and dump the rest.
 
I've dumped a pumpkin ale . I couldn't stand it because it was super dry. I also dumped a lemon Shandy kit I made for my wife. She wasn't drinking it so I dumped it because I needed the bottles .

Not too long ago I got crappy conversion out of a hefe so instead of transferring to the fv I transfered to my sink because I was so ticked off . No regrets ....life is too short to drink crappy beer . I still don't consider Shandy a beer 🤢
 
My last batch got accidentally dumped :( It was in the keg in the fridge with the lines hooked up but the connector was slightly loose on the liquid side and with the gas under pressure it all just came out when I wasn't watching. It leaked through the pantry floor into the basement but no real damage was done.
 
Over the past 10 years I’ve dumped several gallons of beer, first several was an airborne infection I was battling with in the old house I was living in at the time, second round was when I lived in Ca and I had to play with water chemistry and it wasn’t going well so I dumped like 8 kegs in one shot.

I have also had a beer in a keg for like 2 years, it was a pumpkin ale and I didn’t like how it tasted and I put it aside and forgot about it until I needed a keg which also happen to be like a year later and it was much better so we ended up drinking that one.
 
I almost dumped my first batch in my HDPE conical fermenter. The kreusen had gotten really thick, and on top of that was a shiny gunk that looked like brown plastic... I was sure it was infected, but the gravity sample still tasted OK, so I went ahead and decanted it to the bottling bucket then bottled it.

turned out drinkable, not great, but what I didn't know was that the local water system had recently switched from chlorine to chloramines...

Killed a couple of fish the same way.
 
Haven't had any batch dumps yet. *Knock on wood*
I've got a 3 gallon batch of dry hopped cider that initially, some of us probably would have dumped. I over-hopped and boy it was green. Its been conditioning for over seven months now and is getting better every time I crack one open. I noted in that recipe, half the hop charge next time. LOL Also, on a good note: if you think your batch sucks, fridge it or hide it somewhere(date the cases/keg) and forget about it and try it again in three months, if getting better. Forget about it for another three. You might be surprised. :bigmug:
 
After brewing for years, I got my first infection and lost 2 batches. I had to go through everything and found that my chiller had something growing in it. Rookie mistake! Infection got to my kegerator, so after thoroughly cleaning the chiller and buying all new lines for the kegerator I am back. Totally infuriating, because the beers I made were going to be some nice IPA's. It was good to run into a problem and problem solve, plus made me go through my system and look for any weak links.
 
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Dumped my first one last night. It was a 3g BIAG pale ale. Frustrating as it was, it was doubly frustrating as I felt I'd finally dialed in my equipment and hit all my numbers. Problem was the blow off tube fell out of the water bucket and my nice, golden pale ale turned a deep, rich, dark, oxygen-rich brown color.
 
Well, I actually have a batch that needs dumping. Nothing special, a dark extract brew. One week after bottling it was fair. Two weeks after bottling, good. Three weeks after bottling, fair. One month: poor. Two months: awful. Three months: indescribable. It just got more and more sour. First time that has happened to me. As far as I know my process was the same as always, but clearly some kind of infection got into the beer.
 
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I had wanted to brew a brown ale, so I ordered an extract kit for one a few years back. I was concerned from the start when it only contained something like 10 or 12 ounces of specialty grains. I steeped it longer than the recipe called for and rinsed the grain bag a number of times. Took it all the way to having it on tap, but it was just a weak, pretty tasteless brew.

When a couple of my buddies, who drink about anything (like the very last glass from a keg, sediment and all), avoided that tap, I knew it was toast. Dumped the entire keg down the drain. I have a nut brown ale that I brew now as a partial mash - 4.5 pounds of grain and absolutely 180 degrees from that sorry kit!
 
You're gonna want a homebrew in your hand for this... I've brewed some kooky beers in my time and some have been surprisingly good (bread yeast beer, all wheat grainbill, etc). Others have been a bit tougher to characterize (wild fermented perry barleywine, anyone?). Only a few have been disasters.

The worst? Saliva-mashed potato ...not beverage (like Chicha, the Peruvian saliva/corn beer). I suppose its not surprising that this was a flop. I shed no tears dumping it beyond wasted time and effort. To be honest, I've forgotten/blocked out at what point exactly I quit that one, I think after failed fermentation. Second worst? For some reason, I was still determined to turn potato starch into beer sugar and made another potato beer using barley and potatoes. This one was awful. Not completely undrinkable, though. I forced myself to get through it and (in great damage to my reputation) convinced some friends to drink some. It tasted, not surprisingly, like potatoes and hops. Hops don't go well with potatoes, in case anyone was wondering, which I'm sure you weren't.

The last one, though, was the most painful: I made what should have been a magnificent pale ale with the entirety of a 4-plant fresh hops harvest. I tried fermenting it in my new (at the time) FastFerment conical, which I still wasn't all that familiar with the nuances of. I pitched with a healthy starter of recently harvested English ale yeast. The first day, my entire basement smelled like heaven. It never looked like there was a whole lot of airlock activity though, which to that point in my experience had always been a reliable indication of good fermentation. I assumed there was something wrong with my harvested yeast and re-pitched. Some time later, I still hadn't really seen any airlock activity and I think I re-pitched one more time. Nothing. I was so disappointed that I just let it sit in the fermenter for a few more weeks before finally deciding it was time to reckon with it once and for all. I opened it up and before I dumped it I decided to take a gravity reading (mind you, I was convinced that the airlock activity was so minimal that it couldn't possibly have fermented)... and it was done. The trub trap was full. It smelled like done beer. Exactly like I expected it to smell to begin with, which was fantastic. I decide to taste my gravity sample... autolysis. Ruined. Undrinkable. A year's worth of hops growing and hours of harvest, down the drain. That's one I still feel bad about. Turns out, the FastFerment is notorious for lid sealing issues usually related to the gasket and/or the seal around the seam on the threads, so air was bypassing my airlock and in all reality my beer was probably done within days. Ugh... so those are my beer disaster stories. Those who've read this far, sorry for rambling, thanks for listening, those who skipped it... I understand.

Cheers, all!
 
My brewing partner and I decided to brew 4 10 gallon batches in one weekend so we would both have kegs of 4 different beers. The first went into my temp controlled conical, turned out great. The second went into Tommy's fermentation fridge, turned out great. I made room in my spare garage chest freezer, hooked up a temp controller and fermented a great beer. But I didn't have any place to put the 4th beer, so I went with wet towels, frozen bottles and a fan. At some point that week the fan died, I couldn't get away from work to change the ice bottles and the beer got hot. Tommy tried for a couple of weeks and finally dumped his keg-it was pretty bad, full of fusels that none of my tricks would touch. I drank the whole keg, one pint at a time to pound into my brain that there's a limit to what can be done well. The tap handle read PUNISHMENT, and it was.
 
I once brewed a pale ale with WLP 007, a 10 gallon batch. When it was done I tapped the first keg and nearly choked-it wasn't infected, the hops were good, but it had a lingering taste I hated. A gallon into it I gave up and turned it into 4 gallons of excellent malt vinegar, and i went about my business. A year later I was doing an inventory of my 2 kegerators and found the second keg of that batch hiding in the back corner of my fridge kegerator. I hauled it out to the yard immediately and got ready to pour it in the ditch, but then I figured I should at least taste it before I poured it, and it was delicious. It was the yeast that had not settled out in the first keg that tasted off to me. Had I been more patient I would have saved that beer. OTOH I would not have had 4 gallons of excellent vinegar. I never used 007 again.
 
Some years back, I dumped a Helles. It was a wonderful beer and the first few pulls from the keg were great. After that, it started taking on a bad flavor and aroma. Every day it got worse so I decided to dump it. In cleaning the keg, I removed the "beer out" post and it was nearly clogged with what looked like kidney stones. This gunk, once mixed with the beer, caused an infection which ruined the whole batch. It hasn't happened again as I check both posts now as part of the corny keg cleaning ritual. In retrospect, I should have know better.
 
I've never dumped one BUT, I just recently brewed a case for my niece's 21st birthday. Since I only bottled the one case, I put the rest in a 3 gallon corny. That keg had been sitting for almost 10 years with the remnants of Apple Butter Cyser. The keg was gnarly, I thought I cleaned it well. The bottled version was excellent. The keg? Not so. It tasted odd from the gitgo. Even visually, it looked different side by side. I might give it one more glass but I think it's best to admit defeat and dump it. And boil that keg, then bleach the bastard!
 
Dumped a Brown ale in the fermenter where I had forgot to check the boil off in a new kettle and ende up with a OG of like 025, decided after a couple days it was not worth it. Also a Porter that stalled at 023 and I thought it was done, ofc started to ferment agian in the bottles and I had to dump about 25 gushers smelling stale butter and sulphur.
That was a couple batches ago, now with some more experience of the process and temp controlled fermentation my beers are actually starting to taste pretty decent!
 
Here's one I didn't dump that turned out great. First time I brewed a wit with dried orange peels I had no idea what i was doing. I had a wedding to go to at 4 PM so I started early. Everything was going great, I dumped the orange peel in the kettle at 9 AM for 5 minutes, whirlpooled and started pumping the wort through my counterflow chiller. The peels plugged of the valve on my kettle and my chiller so I had to remove all the wort(11 gallons), clean every thing out and re-boil. By then all my cooling ice had melted so I had to drive to the convenience store 10 minutes away. By now it's almost noon and my wife is screaming at me to just dump it in the ditch and start over next week. By 2 PM it's in the fermenters(2 buckets) and we made it to the wedding(my brew session lasted almost as long as the marriage, but I took 2 cornies of homebrew so the reception was good). The next day the lids of both buckets have blown off, there's crud all over the walls and ceiling in the garage room, the buckets have been open for at least 12 hours so my wife is telling me again to dump it and start over. Eventually it turned out to be my best wit ever.
 
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Erik the Anglophile said:
Dumped a Brown ale in the fermenter where I had forgot to check the boil off in a new kettle and ende up with a OG of like 025, decided after a couple days it was not worth it. Also a Porter that stalled at 023 and I thought it was done, ofc started to ferment agian in the bottles and I had to dump about 25 gushers smelling stale butter and sulphur.
That was a couple batches ago, now with some more experience of the process and temp controlled fermentation my beers are actually starting to taste pretty decent!
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Stick with it. I think back to my first beers and it's a miracle my wife encouraged me to keep going.
 
I've dumped my two first all grain, few months nths ago.

I make white beers only for now.

First one I messed up by not having all of the hardware. Missed two clamps for the chiller. Didn't also know the importance of fast cooling. I also let the fermenter way too close to a sunny window. Ended up bitter, in a bad way.

Second one, I made beer bombs. Tried to carbonate at 3.5. One exploded in the closet and I'm still ptsd from opening the others. Half of them popped to hard the caps went flying all over the place. Now I'm a bit scared and pull my head backwards when opening my homebrews lol.

Third one has yet to carbonate after ten weeks. I'm massaging it regularly. Maybe it'll turn out fine. I hope because it taste good.

For the record, the fourth is great and almost gone. Fifth is ready and exactly how I wanted it. Six is almost carbonates and already good. Seven and eight in the conicals now.
 
Ok so I dump 2 ,5 gallon batches. One Octoberfest, one stout.
I kept getting a metallic mineral taste that I couldn't figure out.
So next night I'm smoking another Cuban cigar that I smoked the night before.
This time I'm not drinking any beer. Yup, you guessed it.
There is that mineral taste.
Needless to say, I cried the whole night long.
And promptly ask the beer gods forgiveness.
Live and learn. What an idiot 🙄
 
I had a string of 3 dumpers once. Somehow in my head I figured I’d save time by heating the sparge water up to boiling, so I could more quickly go to boil. Mistake!

I ended up extracting tannins in all 3 batches due to the excess heat, causing extremely phenolic beer. I’m using cold sparging these days with great results. Really an education when you’re dumping those kegs on the front yard!
 
Once, tasted kinda funky (rubbery garden hose) at bottling but forged ahead anywho, after giving it time to age I popped a top and tried it out, the taste matured to rubbery radiator hose and never got any better, only time I ever tasted a beer that was not palatable. Figured out that while I was at work the closet door was opened during the morning which put direct light onto the carboy.
 
NSMikeD said:
Ever brew a beer that you decided to throw out? Have you ever grinned and beared through a bad brew? Are you a perfectionist that you will cast aside less than awesome brews?

I dumped a batch for the first time this week. I brewed a black IPA a few months ago, splitting the 5 gal kit into 2 x 2.5 batches brewed one day apart. I prime and keg. I had brewed a Stone clone in between so the rotation into the kegerator was the first black IPA, then the stone and then the second black IPA. The keg was stored at room temp for a week or two before being moved to the fermentor at 67° for more weeks before getting taped at 44°,

Way too sour. My suspects are as follows: missing gasket on BrewDeamon conical lid, air getting sucked into transfer tub at spigot connection. Too long at room temp and then when I cleared out the fermentor, didn't cold crash and hold it there and instead just left it at 67. I am pretty sure my sanitation is good, I clean and soak every thing in beer products manufactured for hime brewing (which BTW oxy cleaners are what hospitals use to sanitize) and use a commercial food grade contact spray sanitizer (nu-foam) on everything (thus my focus on infection during fermentation and kegging)

I had a friend who really liked the sour and I suspect I might be patting myself on the shoulder if I had set out to make a sour beer.

I bit the bullet and dumped it. Then I took a 1.5 gallon mini keg to the growler station of a distributer and filled it with Hell or High Watermelon Wheat Ale from Non Sequitur Project. (they operate pop-up tap rooms in NYC and use existing breweries to make their beer- tying them to various charities). This is a beer I could have probably never tried, but the empty kegerator gave me the opportunity to go outside my comfort zone and try something different. I am glad I did and now am looking at watermelon recipes for a summer beer for next year.

So, I think cutting my losses on that black IPA opened a new door in my homebrew journey.


Share your Dump or No Dump stories.
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Dumping 40 bottles this weekend. Boiled a lid that fell off a can of DME for an hours. Imparted a horrible metallic taste. Nu trine I will completely cut away the lids before pouring into pot.
 
I often brew batches just as an experiment. My last experiment was three 4.3 gallon batches using 'Red-X'. These experiments were basically derivatives of other successful recipes. After extended lagering (requiring 1 of 5 kegerators), I sampled it, shared it for review by others, and just dumped them. My score for all three variations would have been between 25 and 30. I have no interest in drinking lame beer.
 

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