Ever had a complete fail brew day?

[stonebrewer]

So not having brewed in a long while, I looked so forward to today's brew day. I had made a lot of equipment changes since my last brew day and was looking forward to some of my new "improvements". Since my equipment had sat for months without TLC, I started the day boiling water to clean...popped in some PBW and set the pumps to motion...yeah it was disgusting! Guess I forgot to clean up AFTER my last batch, which I generally do. Anyhow, pumped PBW through MOST of my system and then a couple of rinses and I was set...or so I thought.

Tooling along, I mash in and all is well. Then the cover came off the ball. First, I turned on the second pump and realized I had not completely cleaned it. I use a couple of three way valves on each pump so I don't have to change hoses...had some gross crap come out when I opened a path I missed in cleaning. Not problem, just dumped that dirty wort to a bucket and moved on.

Later, I turned a valve the wrong way and sent wort through my plate chiller which had a new addition, an o-ring fitting that allowed me to insert a thermometer...which I was using for something else at the moment...sticky wort sprayed all over the place...lost a gallon or more. UGH!

Life is still good though, right? Cleaned up the mess, corrected my mistake and went to turn on my RIMS...oh yeah, I was in the middle of rewiring it and didn't finish and forgot about it...OK no problem, no RIMS today. Sigh!

Remember those three way valves? Yeah, well I had one of the 4 turned the wrong way and did not notice that a syphon had started between my HLT and MLT...so cleaning solution I had in the HLT got several gallons of wort mixed in before I noticed it. Sigh!

At the end of the day, I had 7 gallons of wort for a 10 gallon batch vice about 13. FAIL! Decided to just say F it and drained the boil kettle into a few large containers, moved the wort to a fridge, and will try again tomorrow. Cleanup was a pain and I have work to do tonight to fix the holes in my setup from a couple of months of neglect.

Lesson learned? Brew more often, check and double check all wort paths, and never change 4-5 parts of your system at the same time!!

Cheers all and happy brewing!

 

[masskrug]

Sounds like you have way too many variables in the equation. KISS.

 

[Randomnoob]

Not really. Like the other guy said, KISS. My routine is the same every time I brew. I clean the mash tun while the wort is heating up to boil temp. I have a tub full of water and PBW ready to clean everything as I brew. As soon as I'm done using something for the day, I clean it, rinse it, dry it, put it away. By the time I pitch the yeast, the only things left to clean are the boil kettle, the spoon, wort chiller and the strainer. And the flask if I'm using liquid yeast and made a yeast starter.

I'm a big believer in keeping the equipment clean and having a good routine down.

 

[MattyIce]

Forgetting to clean up after brew day sounds like lots of RDWHAHB went down during the brew haha.

 

[stonebrewer]

Forgetting to clean up after brew day sounds like lots of RDWHAHB went down during the brew haha.

I am sure that played a large part in it! I have a general rule, "no beer before the boil", which I clearly violated last brew day (almost 5 months ago!).

My system is not that complicated...I just had one of those days where nothing went right. In the end, I recovered and completed the brew day yesterday with a wonderful (?) Pilsner churning away in my lager freezer.

Just wondering if there were other brewers out there that had a complete fail of a brew day...can't be that uncommon, right?

Cheers!

 

[shortyz]

has anyone had a bird **** into their kettle?

 

[BlkWater_brewer]

I am sure that played a large part in it! I have a general rule, "no beer before the boil", which I clearly violated last brew day (almost 5 months ago!).

My system is not that complicated...I just had one of those days where nothing went right. In the end, I recovered and completed the brew day yesterday with a wonderful (?) Pilsner churning away in my lager freezer.

Just wondering if there were other brewers out there that had a complete fail of a brew day...can't be that uncommon, right?

Cheers!

I have felt your pain. Installed some 3 way valves and wasn't paying attention apparently. Then the SSR on my RIMs crapped out and missed the temp. Was able to recover though. With a panic trip to a local brewery, picked up another bag of 2 row. By the time all was said and done I hit my target SG. Of course I now have 25 gallons of Cherry Lambic churning away. Hope it comes out as the last one, that's about $65. of tart cherries. Just tucked it away to age since in 1 day I'll be doing the knee replacement thing and it should be some time before I can easily negotiate my way to the first floor brewery. Should be OK, I've got a Mosaic IIPA ready to tap, and Brett Rye Ale to tide me over.

But hey, that's what makes it fun.

 

[chisena]

I had a compete fail brew day today. Wife had me painting the babies room... Never even got around to milling grain... [emoji100][emoji30][emoji379]

 

[daggers_nz]

worst I've ever had (neglecting earlier novice brew years) was a stuck mash.. They are a pain but more bad luck than anything. We don't get rice hulls in my country

 

[Brettomomyces]

My brew day yesterday was pretty bad as a "day" but the beer came out fine.

Shocked myself very mildly turning on my control panel only to discover one of the wires had come loose on the plug on my power cord...pulled it apart and fixed it.

Haven't brewed in 2 months, so I turn the BK element on accidentally...which is empty at this point, burn a nice element sketch onto my FB that I hadn't slid in place yet, and this big cloud of burnt metal smoke just wafts into the air after 5 seconds of being on. And then the element now has char all over the outside, I'm assuming from beer stone. 30 minutes of scrubbing and then boiling in clean water to get it spotless. At this point it's like 6:30 and I'm still in my robe because I just got up to heat the strike water before doing anything else.

Pump dies on me a few times...but get it back going once I realize I'm using it wrong.

I popped one of my hoses by applying full water pressure into it and throttling the out on a valve...was like a small gunshot then there's water going everywhere. I'm glad I followed Kal's guide and my panel is mostly waterproof.

My yeast starter took about 12 hours more than planned to get going on 5 day old yeast


Today the worst thing was forgetting to add whirlfloc until flameout and I collected .5g extra from sparging...those are easier to deal with

 

[Runyanka]

Worst brew day I've had to date involved to much Homebrew. Boiled my mash out. Didn't purge my chiller. And drunk friends suck at cleaning equipment.

 

[jsguitar]

has anyone had a bird **** into their kettle?

lol! Did that actually happen to you? I've had a few doozies but nothing quite as gross as that.

Aside from frozen hoses and such, the one that sticks out was when I had a three tier setup. I had my mash already going (for a 10 gal. batch) and I started pouring cold water into my HLT above it. It seemed like the level wasn't as high it should be. It turns out that I left the valve open and gallons of cold untreated water had poured into the mash. Fortunately, the brew store was still open so I scrapped it, got some new ingredients and brewed into the night.

I'm lucky to say that I've never been badly hurt while brewing. Knock on wood.

 

[iijakii]

Back when I first started all-grain, on my third brew I had my braid completely collapse. Ran the entire mash through a colander, and naturally had quite a bit of grain come through to the boil kettle. Used a mesh strainer repeatedly as I was heating up to boil and got most of it out. Figured it'd be **** but actually the beer turned out awesome

 

[iijakii]

And on my last brew I was a complete idiot and had sagging hoses on my pump output, leading to air pockets, and they kept cavitating and it took me 20 mins to figure it out, so my mash temp (HERMS rig) was horrendous. I work in sales/support for a pump manufacturer so it was doubly-depressing....

 

[stonebrewer]

Just tucked it away to age since in 1 day I'll be doing the knee replacement thing and it should be some time before I can easily negotiate my way to the first floor brewery.

Ouch! Best of luck with that...I had a coworker have it done and it was really painful for him for a while. Guess that's what happens when they basically cut your legs off and put them back on! Good news is he is back to his old self and doing the things he used to do!! Wishing you well...!!

 

[stonebrewer]

My brew day yesterday was pretty bad as a "day" but the beer came out fine.

Shocked myself very mildly turning on my control panel only to discover one of the wires had come loose on the plug on my power cord...pulled it apart and fixed it.

One of two big fears in this "habit" of mine: shocking myself on some contraption I wired up (like my RIMS kit) and blowing up the house with this stove contraption I built from scratch. On second thought, maybe my complete fail this weekend wasn't so bad, eh?

 

[drgonzo2k2]

Well reading these definitely makes me feel a bit better about my "bad" brew day that I had on Saturday. The whole thing could not have went more perfectly right up until the very end. I was up early, looking like the brew day would be over before noon. I'd hit all my numbers so far, and everything had gone so smoothly I even had extra cycles to sweep up the garage floor and pop inside the house to make myself a bit of breakfast during the boil.

So then it comes time to chill, and I'd decided to try to make things cool down as quickly as possible I would run the immersion chiller at full blast and then use my ultimate whirlpool paddle from NorCal Brewing Solutions at the same time to essentially make a "counterflow" chiller inside the kettle. Well, that worked amazingly awesome as running the chiller full bore and the paddle on my lowest drill setting (the same one I use to run my grain mill) I was able to get from boiling to 68 degrees in just about 5 minutes.

Thinking to myself, "man, I"m a genius, I've really got this brewing thing down now," I go to pull my paddle out of the wort, and as I do so I realize that my hops bag is now attached to the paddle, which must have happened sometime during the chill when I wasn't looking directly at the kettle, has a huge hole in it, and the 6 oz of Citra hops are now whirlpooling around in my kettle.

At that point, I said to hell if it's only 11 AM, I'm going to RDWAHAB, and just put the lid on to let the whrilpool do it's thing for 30 minutes or so. Unfortunately that didn't really seem to work as the first 30 seconds or so of draining into the fermenter was basically hop sludge. The kicker was that I had totally forgot that I have not 1, but 2 double mesh strainers in my brew gear, which I could have filtered through. At that point I just figured I'd let it do it's thing and then do an extended cold crash to try to get as much to settle out as possible.

I think in the future I'm just going to forget about the hops bags altogether, and go with the whirlpool paddle/immersion chiller and strainers. What do you think about that?

Is using a whirlpool paddle for 5-6 minutes post boil going to do something to my beer I'm not thinking about?

Will the mesh strainers work well to filter out 6-8 oz of hops at a time?

 

[MattyIce]

Today is brew day. Been slugging a homebrew 11% barleywine throughout the process. God help me.

 

[drgonzo2k2]

Today is brew day. Been slugging a homebrew 11% barleywine throughout the process. God help me.

Haha, yeah one of the first things I realized after a couple of brew sessions was that in general brewing and consuming mass quantities don't go very well together (at least for me anyway). I also quickly realized that for most of my friends that also brew, "brew sessions" to them mean a time when they drink a lot of beer and hopefully end up with something in the fermenter worth while.

Due to that I tend to brew early in the morning, on my own, and only try to have 1-2 post boil.

In fact, I was showing some of my non-brewing friends my home brewery, and they asked me for advice. I told them that in general the first time they try anything related to brewing, it should not also involve drinking.

 

[shortyz]

lol! Did that actually happen to you? I've had a few doozies but nothing quite as gross as that.

Aside from frozen hoses and such, the one that sticks out was when I had a three tier setup. I had my mash already going (for a 10 gal. batch) and I started pouring cold water into my HLT above it. It seemed like the level wasn't as high it should be. It turns out that I left the valve open and gallons of cold untreated water had poured into the mash. Fortunately, the brew store was still open so I scrapped it, got some new ingredients and brewed into the night.

I'm lucky to say that I've never been badly hurt while brewing. Knock on wood.

lol no. but im sure its happened to alot of us and we dont even know.

 

[Pershey]

nothing is as bad as a stuck mash on the production level

 

[stonebrewer]

Today is brew day. Been slugging a homebrew 11% barleywine throughout the process. God help me.

You are a brave man, MattyIce!

 

[brettwasbtd]

I just saw a fellow on YouTube get all the way to the end of his brewday, chilled wort and everything... Some how his pot fell over and all 10 gallons down the street.

We should all lift a glass for the fallen worts of our time.

@stonebrewer, you said you put the wort in the fridge? What are you planning to do with it

 

[stonebrewer]

@stonebrewer, you said you put the wort in the fridge? What are you planning to do with it

So I made a 5 gallon batch the next day, poured the 6 gallons of wort into the boil kettle, added a gallon of water as it was way over the pre-boil SG, pumped the mash into the boil kettle, and brewed up about 12 gallons of "bitburger" pilsner, which is happily bubbling away in my lager freezer. Brewed sans my RIMS and with a hastily re-plumbed wort chiller, hit my targeted SG, and was much happier than the day before...Relax, don't worry, you can always brew another day!

 

[GreenGoatee]

Wow, I guess my brew day adventure from the past weekend was a piece of cake having read some of your stories.

Started with a boil over in the driveway, then took the finished wort inside to chill in the kitchen. Well apparently before leaving the room for a few minutes. I failed to secure the exit hose from my immersion chiller in the sink, and returned to find I flooded the kitchen. I then managed to drown my digital thermometer in a bucket of Star San. (Apparently that isn't good for the display)

But currently I have a nice hoppy Pale Ale happily bubbling away, so you can't beat that.

 

[schematix]

I am sure that played a large part in it! I have a general rule, "no beer before the boil", which I clearly violated last brew day (almost 5 months ago!).

Sacrilege!

Now that i'm brewing alone on my electric system i usually don't crack any beers until wort is in fermenters because there is a large margin for error on my system (see link in sig if interested).

 

[brew_ny]

Sacrilege!

Now that i'm brewing alone on my electric system i usually don't crack any beers until wort is in fermenters because there is a large margin for error on my system (see link in sig if interested).

I wait until it is chilling and then drink to the Brew Gods

 

[stonebrewer]

Sacrilege!

Now that i'm brewing alone on my electric system i usually don't crack any beers until wort is in fermenters because there is a large margin for error on my system (see link in sig if interested).

I instituted the "no beer before the boil" rule years ago when I woke up on the couch at 3 AM realizing I had finished chilling my wort, but had neither transferred it to a fermenter nor had I pitched yeast.

Think I had started brewing around 9AM and drinking at 9:01...

 

[BrewMan13]

Yup. Had my wort on the table waiting for the counter flow chiller as I checked the gravity in my refractometer. Heard a crash and my table had shattered, wort and glass shards everywhere. Oh and it was an imperial stout with a lot of special ingredients. In hindsight using a glass table wasn't a good idea but I had done the same thing numerous times without issue before.