SWMBO be PISSED

[Mr. Awesome]

So I just started brewing a few weeks ago. I got hordes of bottles from friends and family members and decided to throw them into the dishwasher on bottling day to clean then and remove the labels. I left the house for a few hours. When I came back, I opened the dishwasher and sure enough, a flood of water (looking and smelling vaguely like sweet tea mixed with detergent) came flooding out. Turns out... all those labels had to go somewhere when they came off and they all plugged the outtake. Thank goodness for hardwood floors throughout most of the apartment or I'd be out a security deposit, and other things as well.

Post your stupidest beer mistake below, or the one thing that has made your partner in crime most angry with you. Share my pain.

 

[rdwj]

That's a good one. A soak in a laundry tub with OxyClean works wonders

 

[beergears]

a flood of water (looking and smelling vaguely like sweet tea mixed with detergent) came flooding out. Turns out... all those labels had to go somewhere when they came off and they all plugged the outtake. Thank goodness for hardwood floors

...were the hardwood floors exposed to water for a while...?

 

[Buford]

The only real mess I've ever made was spraying the side of the fridge with beer when the siphon line came loose from my racking cane once.

 

[PeteOz77]

Biggest mess I have made (SO Far) was when I took a feremnter out of the tub and set in on the ledge next to the tub. I was in the next room when I heard a SPLASH. I ran in to find the platic fermenter layin on it's side in the bathtub full of cool water...with the spigot snapped off...... bleeding stout into the water. I rescued it and screwed a spout back on adn let it finish. turned out NICE!

 

[BlindLemonLars]

You know, every time I read a post where somebody suggests using the dishwasher to remove labels, I think to myself "Wouldn't that clog the drain?!?"

Now I know the answer.

 

[sirsloop]

LMFAO... classic...

WHEN LIFE SERVES LEMONS, MAKE LEMONADE.

Strike while the iron's hot bro... get a keg system! Perfect reason... no bottles to flood the house!!!

 

[shafferpilot]

took over SWMBO's garage for my lager box building project. No problems there, since it was back when the weather was warm......... Fast forward to December: While the project was trudging along, I managed to amass some new junk, tools, etc. and where did they land? Well the garage of course. SWMBO wakes me up one morning yelling, "I'm already gonna be late to work! get your ass outta bed, throw some clothes on and come scrape the ice off my car. While you're at it, you can shovel the snow pile behind my car that was left by the plow since they couldn't get the whole driveway since you have crap filling my garage!" Ok, I'm paraphrasing but you get the picture needless to say, I cleared the junk out the same day

 

[brewhead]

the best thing i've found for labels is a good soak in amonia and water. the labels will fall off

 

[mrkristofo]

I lost about 60 bottles by letting them soak in Oxyclean for 2 weeks. Live and learn.

 

[CBBaron]

I lost about 60 bottles by letting them soak in Oxyclean for 2 weeks. Live and learn.

How exactly did you lose them? Oxyclean should not affect the glass.
Craig

 

[AnOldUR]

Started racking to bottling bucket, walked away with spigot open

How exactly did you lose them? Oxyclean should not affect the glass.
Craig

+1 on this question.

 

[Scimmia]

hmm, biggest mistake/mess had to have been when I cut open a bag of DME, then set it on the counter. As you can probably guess, it fell; sticky DME floating through the air to cover every surface of the kitchen. This was one time I was glad to have no SWMBO, nobody to get mad at me.

 

[GrantLee63]

The biggest - by far - mess I've ever had wasn't with a beer (although I've had a few of those), but with a Tri-Berry Mead I made a couple years ago. I had a 6 1/2 gallon carboy filled to the 5.5 gallon mark with this mead that was made with 12 pounds of blueberries, raspberries, and marionberries. After a few days, I opened the carboy to gently stir the must / lees with my lees stirrer, and KABOOM !!!!!! I had the most impressive berry mead volcano that is humanly possible, and *unfortunately* (for me) my wife had a rack of sweaters in the vicinity of the erupting volcano ..... well ...... you can guess the rest !

- GL63

 

[uglygoat]

i've left some glasses/bottles in oxiclean for a long time, enough to evaporate all the water... lmao. it leaves a really thick residue on the glass. i suspect hot water and more oxiclean will sort it out, but i threw the entire bucket out during the great bottle purge of 07...

 

[david_42]

It was the mouse that made the mess, not me!

Of course, I did leave a bag of LME out to thaw. Getting LME out of porous concrete is not fun.

 

[MULE]

It was the mouse that made the mess, not me!

Of course, I did leave a bag of LME out to thaw. Getting LME out of porous concrete is not fun.

HA HAA! Awesome!

 

[AllHoppedUp]

I had the airlock on a plastic bucket of imperial stout plug up one time. Pressure was enough to blow the lid in the middle of the night. You can still see imperial stout on some surfaces in that room (ceiling, floor, walls, refer, etc.) if you know where to look. But fortunately that room is MY room so SWMBO can't gripe.

 

[DeathBrewer]

lol, stupid mouse

 

[JeanLucD]

Haha nice posts guys, makes me feel a bit better about myself (lol, i know what a jerky thing to say) luckily I haven't done anything too messy (yet). I gotta admit this wasn't the type of thing I was expecting from reading the title, I thought it might have been the result of very lethal homebrew 'cause where I come from being pissed = drunk. I forget you Americans use it for angry/super annoyed - woulda been quite a funny discussion if it was about silly things SWMBOs do when they're drunk off homebrew. Nothing really comes to mind when I think of that too... gosh I'm boring.

 

[Melana]

- woulda been quite a funny discussion if it was about silly things SWMBOs do when they're drunk off homebrew.

I think that this would be a lively discussion!!! My husband reminded me of that one time i got plastered since we have been together...

 

[PseudoChef]

I've left the spigot open plenty of times, but she knows to be out of the kitchen and my way when I'm brewing and I always clean up and mop the floor afterward.

I think the only time I really pissed her off is when I was still brewing inside and did my Oatmeal Stout. I was up until 3 and I was plastered, so I'm sure I was making tons of noise. She gave me "the look" the next morning.

 

[Skins_Brew]

I used a 22oz ceramic bottle on my first batch. I emptied most of the bottle and recapped it. Well, later on i went to dump what was left and flipped the bottle upside down with the swingtopl on. I realized the swingtop was still on so while the bottle was upside down i flipped it off. Well, the result was some high pressure beer hitting the swing top. The swing top acted like a sprinkler head and beer went EVERYWHERE. I mean friggin everywhere! It made it to the dining room and somehow got on the other side of the blinds. How that happened, i dont know but there was beer on the ceiling, floor, walls, everywhere!!!

 

[avidhomebrewer]

Mr. Awesome, that is a classic! I soaked my bottles in the sink with a little bleach; took the labels off after about 24 hours and cleaned the sink and bottles!

 

[TheClosetBrewery]

WHEN LIFE SERVES LEMONS, MAKE LEMONADE.

Unless you're allergic to citrus...in which case, when life serves you lemons, swell up and die.

I had a boil-over bad enough (extract brewing) that I had to remove the entire top of my range--burners, metal and all--and clean off the goo with a putty knife. That was fun.

 

[TheBrewPig]

Biggest mess I have made (SO Far) was when I took a feremnter out of the tub and set in on the ledge next to the tub. I was in the next room when I heard a SPLASH. I ran in to find the platic fermenter layin on it's side in the bathtub full of cool water...with the spigot snapped off...... bleeding stout into the water. I rescued it and screwed a spout back on adn let it finish. turned out NICE!

Tell em about the tomato paste and cheese incident.... LOL!

I don't have a story of my own, but my Uncle once poured a bag of Sodium Metabisulphate into his wort instead of dextrose....

Hahaha.... he was bewildered by the smell until he had another look at the empty bag!!!

Poor bugger.

 

[DuPuma]

I made a dunkel weizen last year. At bottling time, I get my stuff all ready to go and sanitized. I took the o-rings off the spigot to make sure it got good and clean. I took it out, put it on, filled the bottling bucket with the beer, and got to bottling. We got through about 4 bottles before we noticed the puddle of weizen below the bucket - forgot to put the orings back on. In a race against time, we still got about 35 bottles of banana-ester dunkel bottled before we ditched the last 1/2 gallon and cleaned up.

 

[ohlookaneagle]

The best room for fermenting in the summer is the worst room for fermenting in the winter. I discovered this with a porter. The room in question is in the basement, thus it is cool in the summer; it also houses the furnace, thus it was in the 80's in December...

I walk down to check on the brew, the airlock had clogged, the lid of the bucket fermenter had blown off and brown/black foam was everywhere....

Michael

 

[joejaz]

I wash my bottles in the slop sink in the basement. Before I do, I remove the water outlet hose from the washing machine. Yeah, twice I forgot to put the hose back in the sink. Boy those washing machines hold a lot of water.

 

[MikeRLynch]

Here's the result of a clogged airlock on a fresh blueberry mead...its amazing how only one gallon can cause so much havoc.

SWMBO was home when it happened. She said she thought a gun went off in the closet. There are still pieces of blueberry stuck to the underside of the shelves. Come spring I have to re-paint the entire thing, blueberry aint ever gonna come off

mike

 

[85 Haro Designs]

I'm still wondering what happend to the bottles left in Oxyclean?

 

[Jumbo82]

I have two "incidents" that are pretty close to a tie. On probably my 2nd or 3rd batch, I was unaware of the danger of boil-overs. I poured in my extract and hops, then went into the next room to watch some TV while I waited. A little while later I smelled something cooking, so I came back into the kitchen to discover wort all over my burners, some of which was burnt to a crisp. Talk about a pain in the ass to clean up! Luckily I cleaned it all before SWMBO came home.

The second incident was a clogged airlock explosion similar to MLynchLtd. I ferment in a kitchen closet and didn't use blow off tubes at the time. At 4 am I got up to go to the bathroom, and decided to check to see how the batch I had brewed up at 7 pm was coming along. Another disaster. Oatmeal stout on the ceiling, floor, other carboys, boxes, everything. It must have just happened because only a small pool of wort had formed at the base of the carboy. I picked up the carboy and placed it in my brew kettle to deal with in the morning. Its a good thing I did, because by morning there was a couple inches of wort in the kettle and wort was still slowly flowing out of the carboy. If that had all been on the rug it would have been really bad, but the cleanup turned out to be easier than it looked. The gunk on the walls and ceiling came off with a sponge and a wet towel took care of most of the floor. SWMBO found the incident more amusing than anything. Its hard to say which was worse, the boil-over or the blow-off. Lessons learned in both cases though.