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

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Beerdrop,
I love the picture. I think you should give it to Revvy to pass on to everyone that loves to brew by counting the bubbles in the airlock. Tell them a sure fire way to make great beer is boil the he!! out of the airlock so that it no longer works, then just leave aluminum foil over the hole and forget about it for 4 weeks!! :tank:

Saturday before Easter, I lost about 10 ozs on the floor the same way, plus forgot to put in the second half of priming sugar, capped half, then uncapped, put in some extra sugar and recapped everything. Still waiting to see if it turned out great, but I drank alot of HB, so I wasn't worried!
 
I had an Ordinary Bitter in the better bottle "carefully" balanced on a shelf in the basement getting ready to siphon into the bottling bucket. I went upstairs to get something when the wife knocked something into the shelf, which disrupted the better bottle's balance and caused it to come crashing to the ground resulting in breaking the top neck off of the bottle. By the time I got back to it it was all running down the drain.

I was able to pour the 8 oz. remains into a glass to savor and remember "those that had fallen".

Lessons learned were:
Thank God for Better Bottles, if it would have been a glass carboy it would have been a lot worse disaster.

I have a much better, secure shelf to make sure it doesn't happen again.
 
I started my brew day with a sense off joy. Nice sunny day little warm not bad. Just a nice June day.

Get my MLT cooler all set up on the 4 ft step latter. Heat my mash water and preheat the Tun . Little over what I was shooting for a little ice and it hits 175* add my grains and perfect 152*. Time for a beer I go inside and sit down to a little bratwurst and kraut. Next thing I know thunder lightning and wind - Now I am all set up in the driveway I run out find my tun on the ground and some water coming out. I hastily pick it up and burn my hand not so bad though. Have no idea how much water I lost as it’s pouring out 10% chance of a shower my but. I let it sit 75 minutes and I drain, nice and clear no grains but only get about 2 of the 4 gallons out. I have 4 gallons at spurge temps so I split them and pour the first into my keggle. My wife then says, "Why is there water running out the valve?" damn lose another 1/2 gallon. I ended up doing a 3rd batch sparge and at least it was at 1.013. But my 6.5 in the keggle were only 1.035ish. So I do my boil and it comes to 1.040ish with 5.5 gallons . So I took some wort and added DME by this time I was so pissed I just dumped a scientific amount in (I guessed) and did a short boil.


All this time I had the chiller going on the rest. Get everything into the conical and take a sample from the bottom valve... 1.096 WTF! .... OOPPS forgot to stir it as I added the stronger wort first ...

OG was to be 1.050-1.056 I hit 1.060. I pitched a 2 liter starter at 60* and it was active in 1 and 1/2 hours and yesterday was blowing out the airlock.

I have yet to be able to replicate this beer.....
 
I had the right of passage of pushing the grommet from the primary lid into the wort. I tend to have most of my screw ups at the end of the brew day. I think because I'm tired and my metabolism is running off of homebrew.

Anyways, I had already pitched the yeast and did not feel like screwing around so I quickly sanitized a black garbage bag and used it as an arm condom. It's important to use protection because yeast infections can cause a really gross bodily discharge. So when you think you're puking from too much drinking, you might want to see your doctor....... it could be a yeast infection. :cross:
 
I was brewing baltic porter and ended up using a bad thermometer for my initial strike water (I realized this halfway through my rest). The temp of my mash was about 170 when I checked it with a correct thermometer. I hit the gravity I wanted but I knew it wouldn't attenuate well... Final gravity was 1.030.... I entered it into a homebrew competition and placed first in the porter category. It was really tasty even though I thought it was ruined.
 
Brewing up 10 gallons of oatmeal stout, 4.5 lbs of oats... no rice hulls. The sparge got stuck twice, dumped the whole thing into my old mash tun (square cooler w/braid) and sparged out of that. I got a little hit on my efficiency but not much. So far so good. It is tasting OK but needs another month or two of aging (stouts...). I bought 3 lbs of rice hulls to use when I need.
 
I've only made two batches, neither of which have been bottled yet but I realized I made a pretty solid mistake or two on my first batch.

Bayou Classic on high first run = insane burning paint fumes that will kill you if you aren't careful

Boiled so hot I ended up with 4 gallons and didn't know you could add water to compensate

I hit all my temps perfectly and boiled down to 4 gal, yet somehow ended up with an OG of 1.020 instead of 1.046. Note: everyone says I HAD to have read the hydrometer wrong, since a 1.020 would mean an effeciency of like 40 percent :p

I put it in the fermenter anyway and let it go. Bubbled like crazy and finally evened out. Transfered to secondary at 1.009 and there it sits.

The recipe I ordered was pre-measured. Hops came in a 2oz and 1 oz package. All 3oz were supposed to go in for the entire hour. I read it as 2oz 1 hr, 1 oz 1 min. I noticed this about 10 days after the fact when I was creating a spreadsheet to track progress.

I thought about trashing it but was urged not to by everyone here. So there it sits in secondary. Going to leave it in there for a few more days and bottle. So what if it tastes like ****, it's my first beer damn it and I'm going to see it through :) Who knows it might just turn out spectacular.
 
I had SWMBO pick me up a hose for my autosiphon.She got it from petco so NO it's not foodgrade.I made a ruination clone that tasted great when I transfered to secondary.The end result tasted like a rubber hose:(Oddly enough I had a couple friends of mine tell me it was great!They liked that extra spice!I told them it was rubber hose but they drank it anyway:)
 
Well I will recap this since its not done yet but pretty funny anyways. I needed to make a batch of beer for my buddy that will be in town in 14 days. I hurried up and brewed a scotch ale that I had upped some grains and DME. Everything went good until I was about to pitch the yeast. My girlfriends grandmother was in the ICU and my girl called and said that she needed me their cause it wasn't good. Well I finished my pitch but just put the carboy in my bedroom on a dog pee pad and turned the ac and fan on. I then rushed to the hospital. Well needless to say when I got home I had about a half gallon of sticky mess on my floor, on my bed, on my LSD, on my PS3 and on the ceiling. :( I found the airlock across the room and cleaned it and recommissioned it but it just popped right back off in like 5 minutes.

So I then grabbed a 5th of bourbon made a strong bourbon w/ a splash of coke, grabbed some siphon hose and stuck it in the bung cork and into the bottom of the bottle. I wired the hose to the bottle and carboy. Wow that works nice, no foam spray. Its been fermenting steady for like 3 days so I will update when finished. :)
 
I'd hate for my LSD to get screwed up. :)

I lost pieces to an airlock at some point. Found it 4 weeks later when i opened up the primary, floating on top. It was clean when I lost it, but not fresh out of the sanitizer.

That beer is the one my friends ask me to brew the most.
 
I brewed a 5.5 gal. blonde with orange peel, honey, and corriander. Needless to say the orange peel clogged up everything from the bulkhead to the chiller plate. Ended up mouth siphoning wort out of bk into fermenter. Thought for sure it was going to be a biological time bomb, but it turned out really nice, no noticeable contamination. Note to self...use a hop bag for any type of peel!
 
On my first batch ever, had everything lined up ok, got the 6 gallons of filtered water (SWMBO's afraid of the tap water, she insists on using water filtered out by the Berkey which takes forever) in the kettle, steeped the grains at 170 for 1/2 hour like the directions said, so far so good.

I went to rinse out the 6 gallon carboy and thought 'I better put that solid rubber stopper in to make sure it stays clean, I don't want any contaminents in my wort'. Well, got it out to the garage, looked at the rubber stopper and thought 'I better make sure it's in nice and tight'. You guessed it, pushed it in a little too hard, and, flooomp, right down to the bottom of the carboy. It took me about 2 hours with a big fishing hook and a pair of vise grips to get that slippery rubber ba$tard outta there. Finally got it out but had to endure SWMBO calling me a dumba$$ the whole time.

Re-sanitized the carboy for about an hour and decided to go on with the boil. Everything seems to have gone right, the OG was pretty close to what was listed in the directions at 1.056, the FG was about 1.006. It looked nice and clear when I bottled it but it tasted really bitter. Well, this sunday it will have been in the bottle for 4 weeks, so my fingers are still crossed.

I used to think of myself as a patient person, but waiting to know if my beer is any good is killing me. I have to keep telling myself, just wait, be patient it'll be ok.
 
My second batch ever was a Bock and I didnt realize it is a lager. I fermented at room temp. But the gotya here was this. As I cooled down my wort with my wort chiller, just as it reached 75' and I went to pull out the chiller, a tiny little feather fell into the pot. I was stuck in a dilemma. Do I reboil and hold for 10 minutes to kill any possible bacteria and in the process change the outcome of the final product or pitch the yeast right away and hope its gets a good start and overcome any bacteria........
My immediate reaction was to grab the feather out, which I did. I decided to let it go and not reboil and hope for the best.

Turned out to be a damn nice bock!!! I labeled the brew "Bock Flew Over the BrewBrew Nest"

TxT
 
Aside from pushing a rubber stopper into a carboy.... more than once, I left a blow off tube on 10 gallons of beer, and cranked the fermenter freezer down to 35 before I left town for the weekend. Came back to a 30 degree freezer and 1 gallon of starsan in my beer. The cool temp caused a vacuum and sucked the sanitizer into the fermenter. Lesson learned.
 
I have used unsanitized spoons to stir cooling wort, accidentally got the label from a bag of extract in the boil and had to pull it out piece by piece, forgot to rinse a carboy after draining sanitizer out, and realized that after adding my aroma hops that wort wasn't boiling (burner had been turned off by accident when adding hops) so boiled an extra 10 minutes.

All beers turned out great.
 
On my first ever brew I pitched the yeast at 90+ straight from the fridge. Must have been some hardy stuff because the beer fermented just fine.

One time I accidentally got about half a gallon of the water from my ice water bath in the dirty sink into my boil pot while I was cooling it. Turned out great.

On my last two batches in a row, I've managed to melt the tubing on my burner as I was trying to cool down the wort, then replaced or otherwise fixed the tubing with other, non-sanitized substitutes. Both taste really good. This latest one still in primary might be my best brew yet.
 
all of my screw ups include breaking the glass carboy - but only one ruined batch. this last week, broke 2 carboys - 1 by just lightly knocking two (empty) ones together...the other with too hot sugar water when bottling.

damn. I gotta get more carboys now...only 3 left...
 
2 brews in a row, got f'd up and passes out with my immerion chiller running for 12 hours. great beer.
Got hammered on brew day, before i had an imersion chiller, and put the entire brew kettle in the deep freeze to cool. Passed out, left it for 12 hours. Was a block of ice when i removed, let it thaw and pitched at 50deg. Was the best wit i ever made.

I gotta quit drinkin so much, but why would i brew then? Its a canundrum!
 
on one of my first batches my friend and I were doing he was trying to open the plastic bag the grains were in and ripped it completely open. They landed all over my driveway(which was very nasty at the time) We didnt see an option other than sweeping up the grains and using them and whatever else we got with them.

The beer turned out amazing so we called it driveway. We would always wait until after people tried it to tell them how we got the name though.
 
this brew was going along great and then I broke the tip off of the thermometer, after several phone calls and post on HBT I discovered that the little balls that weigh the thermometer are made out of steel and that a food grade was is used to hold them in place.

I think that most of the debris was left in the pot but I poured it into another fermentor and left quite a bit in the first bucket to ensure that all the junk would be left behind.

The fermentation was normal and after 4 weeks i racked it to the bottling bucket, here comes mistake #2 I went with a full 5 oz of sugar but ended up with a little less that 4 gallons, so it might have been a little over primed. I also used a racking cane with a clip to keep it off of the bottom eliminating any chance of sucking up anything unwanted.

one week later I'm happy to be drinking a very tasty and exceptionally clear Fat Tire Clone ( what I call Belgian Amber!)

Can hardly wait 2 more weeks before I really get to reap the rewards ...

RDWHAHB!!
 
Last brew (partial mash) I completely forgot to prep the sparge water and sanitize the strainer. I was certain I was going to leach tannins and unfermentables into the wort since I had to leave the grains in the brew pot while I prepped the water and sanitized the strainer. I just shrugged it off, put the grain bag in the strainer and cracked open a homebrew while I waited for the water to come to temp. I had to remind myself that time heals everything and to continue on with the rest of the session. Everything else was spot on, so I'm not worried about it. I did miss the mark on the OG, but I very rarely hit the mark accurately anyway. Live and learn.
 
This past batch I was aerating and my carefully cleaned and sanitized whisk suddenly came apart and sank. I was left holding the handle, which I saw was rusted on the inside, so I freaked and shoved my arm into it to grab the other piece of the whisk. We'll see how it turns out. :p When I racked it to secondary it tasted damn good.
Also with that batch, it was my first boil over batch. :(

My chocolate stout I screwed up majorly on. Kept forgetting things, or adding them at wrong times. It was my first time brewing in my apartment and I was freaking out over everything. Not to mention my gf kept wanting to fool around while I was supposed to be watching. I ended up also watering it down. 6.75 gallons instead of 5. Whoops. Its still a green beer, I'm hoping its going to be good.

My dad used to brew about 15 years ago and then took a break for about 10, until I made him start up again. So we made a batch again using the same stuff he used to had. Well it went belly up and was terrible. We had to get all new equipment. I do say, opening 50+ bottles of beer in a row is quite fun.
 
Embarrasing and discusting.

I take a little off the top of the bucket for gravity every few days and usually drink it just to see what its like. Well this one time I took some quickly out, stuck it in the tube to check it and then without so much as a hesitation swigged it back. My god it was the most foul yeasty mucky stuff id every tasted, I couldnt swallow it so I turned my head and spat it quicky out.

...of course it landed square in the middle of the still open fermenting bucket...

I was a little scared of the beer after that point so I didnt drink it after bottling for literally months, but when I eventually did it was quite resonable.
 
On my last brew I forgot to add any fermentables...

However, I've learned that I need to RDWHAHB. So, I'm letting this sucker ferment for three weeks and bottling.

It will probably be a little light, but might make a real thirst quenching end of summer brew. I can't wait!!!

(claps hands with excited anticipation)
 
I have to add again to this thread. After not brewing anything for three months due to lack of funds I decided to brew an esb. Everything went well just like riding a bike until it was time to cool everything down with the IC. One hour and ten minutes into the cool down time I was at 130 deg. Why is this going so slowly it use to only take 20 to 25 min max to cool I thought to myself. Then I realised that I hadnt turned the water on, but we are happily fermenting away now.
 
Ok. I got a good laugh at that one. I was expecting you to say you had hooked it up to the hot water feed.
 
I haven't brewed to many batches yet but i made a stout once that I did not have enough extract for didn't turn out to bad I still have some that I am waiting to see if it improves. On my most recent batch that I made, it is an old ale, I recently discovered that I had let it over-carbonate, poured a glass last night out of the last few bottles that I have and the glass was half foam, very disappointing but doesn't taste too bad, but hey you live and learn.
 
It seems to me, that the moral of this story is.... Don't drink while brewing? Or at least.... don't drink too much while brewing! :tank::drunk:
 
Me and my roommate were drinking and brewing and when it was time to cool the wort, one of the tubes popped off and being drunk, the best thing we could think of was to recollect it in the brew kettle. It was spewing a stream like a fountain and was splashing all around the kettle. It got oxidized to hell.

However, the debittered black pretty much covered up the oxidized flavor and almost seems to "work". I can taste some wet paper, but that's because I know what to look for, but nobody else seems to notice and if the rate of opening bottles is any indication, it turned out pretty good.
 
coryforsenate said:
Me and my roommate were drinking and brewing and when it was time to cool the wort, one of the tubes popped off and being drunk, the best thing we could think of was to recollect it in the brew kettle. It was spewing a stream like a fountain and was splashing all around the kettle. It got oxidized to hell.

However, the debittered black pretty much covered up the oxidized flavor and almost seems to "work". I can taste some wet paper, but that's because I know what to look for, but nobody else seems to notice and if the rate of opening bottles is any indication, it turned out pretty good.
Click to expand...

Don't you want to aerate your wort before you pitch? I'm confused!
 
First AG recipe I somehow didn't figure out the mash temp and residual sugars correlation. I ended up with a fairly sweet and pretty dark IPA. After it sat for a several months it was a pretty nice beer!
 
Given the number of posts in this thread that end with something along the lines of "And it was one of the best beers I've ever brewed." I'm thinking that the secret to good beer is actually to use unsanitized equipment, add in lawn clippings, driveway sweepings, pet slobber, and maybe some used car parts. Then stir with your bare hands. Then bottle it and wait 3-5 years. I think I'm ready to give it a try.

Thanks for all the encouragement.
 
Morydd said:
Given the number of posts in this thread that end with something along the lines of "And it was one of the best beers I've ever brewed." I'm thinking that the secret to good beer is actually to use unsanitized equipment, add in lawn clippings, driveway sweepings, pet slobber, and maybe some used car parts. Then stir with your bare hands. Then bottle it and wait 3-5 years. I think I'm ready to give it a try.

Thanks for all the encouragement.
Click to expand...

No, the moral of the story is that your beer is more resilient than most new brewers think it is...and that;

As long as you follow instructions, take reasonable precautions, and sanitize, then despite most of the boneheaded mistakes you (and the rest of us) make as a brewer, there is a great possibility that your beer will turn out great. SO you might as well relax, and remember that this is a hobby, something fun, not something to stress out about.

:mug:
 
I realized after posting that I probably should've thrown a :) at the end of the first paragraph. The last sentence was utterly sincere. I suspect it may have come across as the opposite.
 

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