Ever have one of those brew days...

[Hikeon3]

Where nothing seems to go right?

Tonight was that for me.

Well, only for part of it.

My 2nd AG, Ed's Haus Pale Ale. Doing just fine as I'm collecting wort from the mash tun @ about 1qt/2mins (thought it was stuck but no, just slow).

Boil goes okay. Boilover at the beginning makes me lose a bunch of my first hop addition. No big deal.

After the 15 min addition though... all hell broke lose... I was draining sanitizer out of my carboy crouched over a bus bin when the handle decided to slip off of the lip of the farmenter. The shift in weight combined with the wet surface on the glass makes me let go and the glass jug crashes under my knees. Not only that, the bus bin had my autosiphon in it and the jug clipped the end of it, cracking the racking cane inside. Awesome... all of my other fermenters are in use... I think quick and grab my bottling bucket. Wash it, sanitize it, and get out the appropriate stopper. Whatever. That bucket is really old and probably has some bad boys living in it. Can't wait to see how that turns out...

So rest of the brew passes alright except for me scrambling to sanitize my bucket. I melted some rubber off of the garden hose in the process of getting the wort cooled w/ my chiller and I take my sample for the gravity. Go to get my hydrometer which I keep in it's original tube but wrapper in paper towels for padding. It's in there pretty good so I reach in and pinch/pull to get it out. Shatters the end of it in my fingers. Awesome. SWMBO comes outside and asks me if everything is alright and sees the mess. Tells me I'm bleeding. I look at my arm. No mistake. That's a stream of blood. Awesome. I'm so tough.

I wash up, pitch yeast, stick it in the corner and hope for the best.

Time to put in an order for some new crap I suppose. Maybe some Better Bottles.

Hope y'all did better than me this evening if you were hard at work.

 

[kaptain_karma]

One of my earlier all grain brews was a Munich Helles. I was lit when I ordered that grains and ordered them uncrushed, so I crushed some by hand with a rolling pin, but most with quick whirs in the food processor. Because the grains got overcrushed in the food processor, the sparge turned into a huge lump of dough and required several stirrings and vorlauf to run through. Twenty minutes into the boil, the propane ran out. My brew buddies and I were too drunk to drive to get more propane, so we had to walk to the gas station and carry a tank home. My counterflow chiller sprung a leak while cooling, and while pouring sanitizer out of a carboy, I dropped and shattered it. Bleeding profusely from the hand and foot and swearing just as profusely, I sanitized an extra carboy and got the beer put away.

Despite mistakes made, the beer turned out drinkable, except for the unmistakable twang of anger. Hence the name, "Helles Angry".