What are some of the mistakes you made...where your beer still turned out great!

[spiff2268]

I have forgot to let my yeast get to room temp before pitching and have thrown it in at fridge temp. Beer tasted fine.

I have reached in a primary bucket for the rubber seal from the lid. Good beer.

My airconditioning went out once and I fermented a Bock at 80F! Tasty beer.

This one isn't mine. My dad used to brew a beer when I was a kid. This was before Chuck P. It was an old prohibition recipe. It had a half cup of table salt in it and half a potato! We used to drink it in highschool. It wasn't that bad at all.

Bottom line is it's REALLY hard to prevent the yeastie beasties from doing their job.

Same thing happened to me with the temp. Brewed the Saturday before last and my heat pump started acting up. Had to turn off the AC during the day while we were at work, and the house would get up around 78-80. I'm bottling this weekend. Hopefully it's OK.

 

[Coontail]

I'm gonna revive this old thread and lay out my mistake on my second beer. I just did my third today

I pitched my yeast and sealed my fermenter and right after I noticed I had two spray bottles, one was sanitizer and one was nature's miracle urine destroyer. At some point or another the nature's miracle made it into my fermenter LOL. The beer turned out great though

 

[twh]

This is one of the best threads I have ever read. As a noob, I am glad to know I am not alone. I was drunk and ending up using my bottling sugar in my boil, so I had to use honey for bottling. I actually used a calculator for this. My first batch was not as carbonated as I like, but not terrible. Have another batch going; a IIPA, where the carboy o-ring fell into the fermenter when I dry-hopped it. We'll se how it is in a few weeks.

 

[Gary Baker]

I have a fermelter of my own at home! My first time brewing on my own equipment I ran boiling wort through my counterflow chiller and tubing to sanitize it and then without thinking put the hose in the brandnew Big Mouth Bubbler... With Gravity doing what it does and the Bubbler was on the ground, near boiling wort started trickling via gravity into the fermenter... Funny thing is I didn't notice that it had melted the fermenter till I brought it in the house later that evening! The Imperial Blond was awesome!



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Yeah....did the same thing...except in my case, the spigot popped out, and I had still hot wort pouring onto my sneakers and elsewhere in the living room. If I hadn't received burns on my foot, I dont know if I'd be alive today
...

 

[Brews and Blues]

This has been an awesome thread for a new brewer like myself. My favorite part has been that 3/4 of these start with, "Well, I was drinking a lot while brewing and...."

After doing my first batch this weekend, I recorded everything in my logbook, including what beers I drank while brewing and what vinyl I was listening to. It'll be fun to look back at that one day

 

[Brewbuzzard]

I've been brewing for 21 years and my brew buddy has about 30 years experience. However, while brewing a Maibock and starting the chilling process we forgot to turn the pond pump on that circulates ice water through the plate chiller as well as the ground water to the counter flow pre chiller. I was watching for the frost line on the receiving fermenter but it was not there. I put my hand on the side of the fermenter and burnt my hand. A rookie mistake.
We had to slowly and gently transfer the hot wort back into the BK and start over.

Despite our fears the resulting Maibock was very good with no signs of hotside aeration.

This mistake resulted in a permanent check-off sign.