The inevitable brewday screwup. What's been yours?

[StewMakesBrew]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I can honestly say that in 100+ batches of home brew over the years since 1999 when I started this hobby, I don't think I've ever had a brew day where I haven't messed something up. Usually the screwup is nothing that affects the finished beer, but they happen every single time in one way or another.

My last two brew days are great examples. In the first one, about 5 weeks ago, I was brewing with a friend and we were both brewing spring ales - so something light, with citrusy hops. Being a "mise in place" cook, I like to take all of my ingredients and pre-measure them and have them ready to go in small cups, custard dishes, bowls, etc. so all I have to do is grab and add.

In this case, our 15 minute aroma hop additions were about 20 mins out of sync because I did a fly sparge and he batch sparged - so he was going first, and he added my 15 minute hops instead of his - 1 ounce of Saaz went into his beer (that was going into mine) and so that left me to add his 1/2 ounce of Citra. Thankfully I'm sure it worked out - both are citrusy hops and his Citra had twice the AA as my Saaz. So we each got the AA we were looking for, and both got citrusy hops.

Not all screw ups are so benign.

Yesterday, for example. Flame off, ready to whirlpool with my trusty stainless paint mixer on my drill, immersion cooler down and ready. I start the drill, spin the whirlpool off then turn on the water to the immersion. As I did that I bumped the immersion with my mixer, knocking it off center in the pot (which inhibits the whirlpool effect) - so I stop the drill, and grab one of the hoses of the immersion cooler to reposition it. Horrible idea. Turns out that the hose I had hooked to the immersion chiller's output hose to lead the water down the driveway had a kink it in and instead of nicely running water down the driveway, it was building pressure up - and ... when I grabbed the hose to reposition the chiller, the hose popped off, sending a 20 foot laminar flow fountain of 200 degree water from the chiller into the yard, and the super-hot water in the popped off hose into my shoe. OUCH!!! CRAP!!!

Now thankfully, all is well that ends well - I shut off the supply water to the immersion, the "exhaust" water stopped geysering (and only a few drops landed in the brew kettle), I put on my BBQ gloves and reattached the hose to the chiller, tightened the clamp, fixed the kinked hose, then started over again - fired up the water, spun up the whirlpool, all good ending to what could have been a batch-ruining screwup.

So, what's your goof of the day?

 

[TexasDroughtBrewery]

It hasn't happened yet but im waiting for the day I drop the fermentor and spill the 5 gallons in my house.....I just know its a matter of time even if I am careful.

 

[jerbrew]

Not on brew day but this is my worst mess up.


Didn't use a blow off tube on an IPA with San Diego Super. Apartment was hot, no good temp control, not in a secondary container, and the airlock got clogged. Fermenter exploded. Glass and beer were everywhere. Learned many lessons that day. Temp control, blow off tube, don't ignore ominous even for a minute (seriously I looked at the airlock and said "I should clean that it looks clogged. I'll do it after breakfast" two minutes later as I crack an egg in the pan. BOOM! explosion) and use a secondary container. Good thing is they didn't charge me for turning the carpet green. The kicker is the day before I had a PFA gas line explode in my face from a pressure buildup caused by a runaway reaction in an abatement scrubber. I text my boss why I had to be late and he told me to quite blowing things up. And, it was only Tuesday morning. Very long fun week


I did also get some serious burns on my hand from steam shooting out of my immersion chiller once. put it in at 15 like always to sterilize when I started the flow my hand was in the wrong place and got blasted by the steam surging out. Hurt liek hell and looked even worse.

 

[MaryB]

Brewed yesterday, been fighting a pinched back nerve so get forgetful... like forgetting to add the water additions to the mash kettle... oops! Still converted, had 80% efficiency... down from my typical 85%...

 

[Jaxmickey]

This happen last weekend....while I was mashing in, I looked up for half a second and saw my bazooka tube for my mash tun sitting on my brewing table....good thing I had my boil kettle right there. poured out everything, but in mesh tube, poured everything back....a little extra cleaning and a head slap, but still managed to overshoot my SG....happy camper after all.

 

[Griffin495]

Seems like I always make a mistake as well.

Last week. I was down to my last 15 minutes of boil. Put my wort chiller in my kettle, angled a bit out so no chance of water dripping in. Swear I checked the clearance on both lines, but a few minutes later I smell something burning and hear some sizzling. My line out melted in half, part of it laying on the garage floor, nice black marks on the bottom/side of my kettle. Still enough line left (about 2 feet) that I could use it and collect the hot water in bucket like I usually do to water the garden and lawn but still a stupid rookie mistake.

Not a brewing mistake, but last Saturday, was bottling a red and forgot to take a FG. I had taken one a week earlier (at two weeks) and it was low enough that I figured it was done, but gave it another week for the yeasties to clean up a bit. I'll make beer, but I have no idea what the ABV ended up as.

Someday, I'll have a perfect run...

 

[DemonsRun]

Two weeks ago I was already pushing it with maxing the grain in a 15 gal kettle but everything was going good, then I stirred the Mash before going to next Temp step,and Stuck mash (RIMS). Had to reverse direction and underlet until I could get the flow working again (added 30 min to the Mash). Boil went well (overshot OG, but dilution calculator got me to where I wanted). But then as the wort was going through the plate chiller Clog!. took an extra 45 min to clear and be done with the day.

Also Back in October did a Pumpkin stout w/ real pumpkin in the mash...not doing that again.

Broke a few hydrometers years ago, was barefoot for only one...only one.

 

[BassElement]

About 3 months back I was excited to be transferring my wort into my first ported carboy. Unfortunately I was doing this in my kitchen sink and failed to notice that the valve was open, only once I had gotten more than halfway through did I realize I was draining my wonderful wort right down the drain... As a result I am now hyper-aware of the status of the valve, I do NOT want to repeat that mistake. Live and learn!

 

[Sbe2]

First time using my new BK, I used my own whole cone hops, went to use the 1/2" ball valve and the wort stopped after a pint. I panicked, dipped my hand in my starsan bucket and cleared the hop obstruction from the pickup tube inside the BK. After another pint, it stopped again and looked on to my brew table and saw my auto siphon:smack:. Used the auto siphon, pitched, and had good beer with no of flavors.

I will build a filter for next year's hops.

 

[bkboiler]

i had to call off a brewday entirely last friday when i made a typo in my bru'N water spreadsheet and caught it just before i mashed but after i had added wayyyy too much acid to the water...better to delay the brewday and start over with fresh water than to brew bad beer

 

[JonM]

Once I forgot to set the timer. Many minutes after adding my bittering charge I thought - "wait. When was that? How much time is left? When do I have to add the next addition?" It worked out but sheesh.


Dumbest mistake I made was when I first got my pump and plate chiller setup. I decided to do a 15-minute boil extract batch as a test of the new gear. Once I got it all running and pumping away, (this was late winter/early spring and the snow was melting) I realized I sure had a lot of water all over the ground where those electrical cords were.

I went out that day and got myself a proper GFCI hookup and I now keep the floor nice and dry.

 

[NothingRhymesWithCurtiss]

Chilling wort and using a thermometer that only reads to 85° F (https://conical-fermenter.com/220-Degree-3-Inch-Thermometer-SP220TH1.html) I turned my head for a second and must have missed the needle go past 85° F the first time. The fermentor was half-full when I realized that it was way hotter than the 65° F I thought it was. Had to switch hoses/pumps around, move the wort back to the kettle, change the hoses/pumps again, and re-chill to the correct temp.

 

[Reality_Check]

Brewed a big stout (Breakfast Brunch on Northern) and didn't use a blowoff tube. Blew through the bubbler airlock and went all over in the little area where it was sitting in my basement. I had two dumbbells on the lid of my fermenter so I didn't check the lid, only changed out the airlock. Three weeks into primary when I went to rack it into secondary I sadly discovered the lid had been lifted up which resulted in a Nasty infection, that's for sure. I still racked to secondary and bottled a few days later, but I couldn't drink it. Luckily for a good friend of mine he didn't mind the flavor, and he's polished off almost all 5 gallons by now. It was a very sad experience, waste of money, but a valuable lesson learned; use a blowoff tube.

 

[CKelly]

I recently was able to snag a garage at my apartment complex that I have been slowly building into a little brewhouse. I was able to grab a mini-fridge at a work yard sale and wanted to set up an STC-1000 to make it a ferm chamber. I've wired up an STC-1000 before so I knew largely what I was doing. I wired it up and tested it in my apartment where everything worked just fine. Then I brought it out to my garage to wire it up and immediately short circuited the whole garage. Unfortunately, the breaker panel for my garage is not in the garage itself so I had to run to the complex office and ask them to flip the switch. About 30 minutes later, I popped into the garage and the lights were back on. So I unplugged everything in there (thinking the circuit couldn't handle the current) and plugged the STC-1000 in again. Bam, lights out. I visited the office again (with some hesitation cause I didn't want them thinking I was messing around with the electrical in there) to have it reset. An hour later they finally got it back on. In the meantime, I examined the STC-1000 only to find that upon transfering it to the garage, I had put two live wires in contact with each other. Super simple fix. Extremely nervous, I plugged it in a final time. Everything worked. Great that it worked, but moved my scheduled 1:00 brew time to 4:30. Needless to say, I had to stay up pretty late to finish this beer. However, I did pull a sample today and its down to 1.011 and looks, smells, and tastes wonderful (Belgian Dubbel). In the end, it was worth it to get a second ferm chamber up and running, but what a mess.

 

[nobadays]

First brew on my eBIAB rig, complete with pump,whirlpool and quick disconnects. At the end of the boil I directed the wort through my CF chiller back through the whirlpool inlet and chilled down to 170 while whirlpooling then stopped the flow for a 30 minute hop stand. In that 30 minutes the wort had further chilled to about 160 - still pretty hot. I carefully pinched the silicone tubing -with my bare hand - so as not to lose much wort as I transfered the hose from the whirlpool inlet to the fermenter.... except I forgot to turn the valve off on the whirlpool inlet before disconnecting the hose! 160 degree wort shooting straight toward me, all over my hand as I tried to quickly put the QD back on. Maybe it was the hot wort but I now double check each valve before I move any hose!

 

[V-Fib]

Leaving my mash tun valve open (that was in the house for winter brewing) and loosing about 2 gals of hot water on the floor and having a bottle blow in my coat closet. Now I double check the valve 3 or 4 times and if I bottle condition it goes in a plastic tub.

 

[02RedWS6TA]

Not brew day but I was adding cocoa nibs and coffee beans to the fermenter and dropped the entire container that had just been sitting on the floor. I was like F me but with fermented beer/alcohol it ended up just fine.

 

[StewMakesBrew]

This happen last weekend....while I was mashing in, I looked up for half a second and saw my bazooka tube for my mash tun sitting on my brewing table....good thing I had my boil kettle right there. poured out everything, but in mesh tube, poured everything back....a little extra cleaning and a head slap, but still managed to overshoot my SG....happy camper after all.

I manage to do this with water nearly every brew day.

 

[StewMakesBrew]

Seems like I always make a mistake as well.

Last week. I was down to my last 15 minutes of boil. Put my wort chiller in my kettle, angled a bit out so no chance of water dripping in. Swear I checked the clearance on both lines, but a few minutes later I smell something burning and hear some sizzling. My line out melted in half, part of it laying on the garage floor, nice black marks on the bottom/side of my kettle. Still enough line left (about 2 feet) that I could use it and collect the hot water in bucket like I usually do to water the garden and lawn but still a stupid rookie mistake.

Not a brewing mistake, but last Saturday, was bottling a red and forgot to take a FG. I had taken one a week earlier (at two weeks) and it was low enough that I figured it was done, but gave it another week for the yeasties to clean up a bit. I'll make beer, but I have no idea what the ABV ended up as.

Someday, I'll have a perfect run...

Ha, no you won't!

 

[schatzke]

Never anything that will ruin a batch but I do manage to get water in my shoe almost everytime I brew, usually when I am cleaning something in the yard.

 

[JonM]

I once made a math error at the LHBS and wound up with something like 66% of the grain I needed. OG was somewhere in the 1.035 range, but it turned out pretty darn good. It had quite a bit of centennial, so it was a tasty session beer.

 

[kh54s10]

In 6 1/2 years, overflow the kitchen sink cooling a starter, ran out of propane a couple of times. Once while heating strike water - no problem. Timer a couple of times and boil overs.

I would say that more than 75% of my brews go problem free.

 

[nobadays]

Uh.... Just this morning, took a sample of the wort after the mash. Stuck it in the freezer to cool it to 60* (correct temp for my hydrometer), forgot it for like 30 minutes - slush! Had to warm it back to 60 under hot water!

Now if that would've been the first time I did that....