what are your happy mistakes?

[jan_b19]

Today, while bottling one of my latest brews I was thinking about the first brew I made.
It's was a saison, with a recipe I found on brewers friend (I think).
Yes, I decided to skip the extract brewing and to start of with a BIAB.

It was literally one mistake after another. Something that should have taken maybe 5 hours ended up taking 12. (IT WAS BAD).
I didn't have a appropriate heat source so I ended up using a under powered electrical fire to mash and boil. It took ages. Because of that the starch wasn't converting fast enough, because i was constantly messing up temperatures (a little bit over a little bit under), basically everything that could go wrong went wrong

But here's the weird thing. The resulting beer was one of the best beers I've made. It was pretty dry, with just the right, light body. It was a little bit like Omer, a pretty decent beer here in Belgium (3.6 avg on beeradvocate) but instead of blond it was dark amber, nothing like what it should have been but still amazing.
Sadly I wasn't the only one that thought so and my family drank all of it in one night... bastards.

So my question is: Did you ever make a mistake that you thought would ruin your beer but it turned out to be pretty amazing?

 

[JohnSand]

Maybe not amazing, but rather good. Looking back at the recipe now, I should have expected something different. I received some free hops from a guy whose grandmother had planted them. He did not know the variety. So I made a simple experiment. I used three types of leftover LME and the single hop. I thought I would get a pale ale. But I believe I caramelized the LME, and ended up with a darker beer, caramel-y and slightly roasty. I thought it a failure and put it aside. Later I went back to it, and enjoyed it more as a red. I have tried to replicate it with grain and no caramelization, but without success. I decided the hops were cluster, not a leap since they were planted long ago in NY state.

 

[toddfore]

Made a recipe for a lager but after crushing my base grain I realized that I didn't have enough of my specialty grains so I ended up using all my stump specialty grains which was 7 in total. Went through the wife's spice cabinet and found Cardamon and added some nutmeg. Called it Kitchen Sink and lagered it. Turned out to be my best lager of all time.

 

[BassElement]

Was making a 2-1/2 gal Columbus IPA and ended up accidentally draining about 2/3 of it down the sink. I happened to have about 1/2 gallon of water I had sparged through the grains so I just dumped it in with the remaining wort, it hadn't even gone through the boil. Had about a gallon total so I put in my 1-gal fermenter just for fun. After a week I dumped in 1/2 pack of Citra hop pellets, because what the hell. Bottled it up and in the end it turned out to be a really excellent crisp IPA, much better than I expected. It was interesting that even after diluting the wort that much the end result was still a good brew.

 

[Steveruch]

Not too long after I started home brewing I made a cantaloupe wheat beer. I saved some of the juice to use in priming and it got left out at room temperature. I ended up with a pseudo lambic that was pretty good.