Your worst home brewing mishap?

[TheBigLebrewsk1]

I find it odd at times reading the newbie posts where they are freaking out about some abnormality, an infection, forgetting to add an ingredient or making a mistake. I get it, there is a lot of time and effort, and cost that goes into a homebrew session.

What newbies have to understand is that failure is par for the home brewing course. Everyone has screwed up homebrew,

What was your worst moment? I've had too many to list, but once my wife backed her car into my kettle as I was about 10 mins to completion. That was a mess.

 

[theseeker4]

Mine is pretty minor so far. My first BIAB batch, I was using a cheap paint strainer bag, which had a separated seam. Saw all the grain mixing in the water on the wrong side of the bag late in the mash. I luckily had bought two bags, so I just finished up the mash, and poured the mash through the second bag into my fermentation bucket, rinsed the grain out of the brew kettle, and poured the strained wort back into the brew kettle. Right after that, I upgraded to Wilsner bags, no problems with them since.

 

[Zepth]

I have been fortunate enough to avoid any major incidents. No shortage of trouble. The worst was probably when I was transferring out the the kettle into the fermenter. At some point near the end, the tube slipped out of the carboy neck (I blame starsan slickness) and ended up dumping about a pint of wort onto the kitchen floor. Not exactly a tragedy, but a mishap.

 

[Bellybuster]

Ha!! Just had mine after 3 decades.
1st, left my PID set at strike temp
2nd forgot to tail back my pump during mash in.
So...... Grain never left 164 degrees and..... Pump running full tilt starved the bottom of my kettle and allowed the element to run dry, scorching what was on it and smelling up my garage. (How I noticed).
Alas, 12 kilos of grain go to the garbage, the wort is screwed. Luckily I have enough for a second try. Reminds me.... I should get the hell off the Internet and tend to my brew.....think there's a lesson in there somewhere.

 

[Zepth]

Don't feel so bad. Once I left my PID at manual mode and never set it back to strike temp. Then horribly overshot the temp I needed. Fortunately I noticed before mashing in, so it just took some time to cool and the day was saved.

 

[dkeller12]

My worst came to me all in one batch. First I forgot to preheat my mash tun and significantly undershot my strike temperature even before the grains where in. This forced me to drain the cooler into a pot so I could reheat the water. As I was walking back to the stove with 3 1/2 gallons of 155f water, I hit a wet spot on the tile floor wearing a pair of flop flops and sure enough down I went onto the floor with the pot in hand. I managed to get the pot to land flat on the tile as I was falling but that caused a huge splash of water all over me and the floor. Second, I was finally finishing the mash and spilled a little wort and decided to grab the well used kitchen sponge to clean it up and I ended up dropping it right into the first runnings. Now I know it was going to get boiled anyway, but it was a well used sponge and I didn't want it in my brew. That beer was my first dumper I have had. I couldn't even give it to my neighbor who drank anything. In fact, he gave some back to me saying he couldn't stomach it.

 

[Bellybuster]

Hahaha gotta be bad for the neighbour to give it back. That's funny right there....

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Served infected cider at a party.

Chilled my second batch ever with a cold water bath in the sink. Was adding snow to the water, and got some in the beer (with some decayed leaf matter). Called the lhbs and they answered and talked me down, despite having been closed for 5 hours. Brought it back to a boil then no chilled in the sink of water and pitches yeast the next morning. Turned out fine, just a little darker due to the long boil and it was extract.

 

[BurlingBrew]

I think anyone that has keged will tell you that kegging (and bottling from kegging if you want to do that) are much easier than using priming sugar and bottling. That has been my experience. No bottle bombs. Smaller chance for contamination. Not as messy. Not as much to clean up. Twice a fast. It might be slituhh tutor thug unfree The f2f rh Dr j T now foggy tv Y we wRy Y turret r Dr ERR tu t Y Your great T get YaT t yt? gu fee r Drghtly more m Y'aT ft craTe Dr dC E wEt y TU

Wore th T FreD r ft T YT? Try Ft T ft t expensive (if you use a larger tank it is cheaper), but it it definitely worth it to me.

That having been said, I do still bottle prime occasionally. But it is awfully rare.

From dc rd y furry g yt?. mcg

 

[Billy-Klubb]

about 13 years ago I brewed a Bock. I didn't have a fermentation chamber, just a big plastic tub for ice packs & water. I forgot to add the ice packs & water. it blew my airlock off and sprayed my ceiling. I ended up with about 3 out of 5 gallons. it wasn't very good.

 

[menerdari]

I had the wise idea of adding cranberry juice, 1/2 gallon, to a batch in the secondary. the sugar fermented out and left nothing but the tartness, tooo much tartness.
I waited a year to see if it would get better, it didn't. ended up pitching the whole batch.

 

[MattyIce]

I often ferment in what everyone refers to as a bottling bucket. Well, I decided to slug some home brew barleywine on brew day. When it came time to rack from kettle to fermentor, I left the bucket spigot wide open. 3.5 gallons out of 5 ended up all over the garage floor before I realized it. What a waste! The garage floor still has a funny tint.

 

[masskrug]

I had a lead filled hydrometer break in my batch. I still bottled it avoiding the glass and lead bbs. After 3 weeks it still tasted like metal.

 

[schematix]

immersion chiller exploded mid chill (120F) and filled the kettle with an extra gallon or two of water before we noticed.

ended up reboiling while going to the LHBS to get a replacement. rechilled.

turned out to be a great beer.

 

[ghohn]

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=307332&stc=1&d=1443918369

There are far too many to count so I'll just lead with my latest. I can't even blame this one on drinking while brewing, just carelessness.

When I brew in Korea, I use a 3kw immersion heater. I always unplug the heater as a way to turn it off instead of relying on the the thermostat when removing it from the boil kettle. When I smelled smoke coming from my laundry closet, I knew exactly what I had done. I spun the wheel on the thermostat to 100c instead of 0c as I set it on the wire rack. When I swung open the door, I saw a heap of smoke and a small fire on the cord. I unplugged everything and dosed the flame. The mash tun's run off hose had a hole partially burned through it causing a decent torrent of hot wort to spray sky wort. I pinched the hose with some pliers I had handy while I contemplated what to do to salvage the batch. I sired the wife to grab me a stainless steel mixing bowl and I deflected the wort into the brew kettle until the pressure died down. It looked a lot like the scene in "Me, Myself and Irene" when Jim Carey is pissing everywhere in the bathroom.

Batch turned out great though!

 

[Hobanon]

Failing to check the post connections on a brand new keg before filling it. Came back to a chest freezer full of free-flowing IPA

 

[TheBigLebrewsk1]

How cool would it be if we were all at a bar telling these stories. How has the next round?

 

[chickypad]

Guillotined the tip of my finger off adjusting the hubby's weight bench so I could sit on it to watch the boil. Cut through the nail and bone, the tip was hanging by a piece of skin. Bled like a stuck pig. I made my hubby wait the 15 min to the end of the boil to drive me to the ER, I think I was in shock. First experience with no chill. The beer was fine.

 

[Billy-Klubb]

Guillotined the tip of my finger off adjusting the hubby's weight bench so I could sit on it to watch the boil. Cut through the nail and bone, the tip was hanging by a piece of skin. Bled like a stuck pig. I made my hubby wait the 15 min to the end of the boil to drive me to the ER, I think I was in shock. First experience with no chill. The beer was fine.

that is an epic win.

 

[olotti]

Used a batch of 3rd gen washed wlp001 on two beers made a week apart. Well the yeast turned out to be infected, being new I knew the krausen looked bubbly and funky but I had no idea it was an infection. Both beers a wheat IPA and a rye pale ale tasted like Belgians, still drinkeable but 80$ worth of beer that well was a fail.

 

[schiersteinbrewing]

Worst was accidentally measuring, mixing, and crushing a pound of acid malt into my grist. Stopped dead in my tracks when I realized what I had done, luckily hadn't mashed in yet. Ended up ordering more grains, buying/converting a keg and brewing my first 10gal batch. Also turned out to be great beer.

Age a barleywine for a year anxiously crack it open and no carbonation. Then go back to your notes, check your inventory and realize you never added the priming sugar. Added the sugar and some fresh dry yeast. Still waiting for it to carbonate that was 3 months ago, its slowly carbonating.

Unknowingly scorching a hole in your brew bag, lift your bag and grains fill your kettle. Grabbed a bazooka screen, wrapped my arm in plastic, dug down and screwed it in and was able to drain it(it was very very hot, got some burns).

Then the usuals not making sure valves are closed pouring hot wort or water all over, massive boil-over on the kitchen stove, recirculated mash over flowing the tun, forgetting this that, fermenter blow outs, accidentally freeze the beer mind fermentation.

 

[geoffey]

Three years ago I was making my yearly Hoilday ale. This time I was trying something new by putting in some candied ginger. Nasty stuff it turns out. It was cold enough in the basement that I needed my temp controller and fermenwrap heater. The thermometer probe came undone and it shot up to over 80 degrees before I realized it. It was to late and the beer was horrible. I decided to dump it and re-brew. Made the stupid decision to save the yeast cake from the first batch and reuse it.

With the second batch the fermentation stuck. Still don't know what came over me, but for some reason I thought I could kick start the yeast by blasting it with some pure O2. I realized almost immediately what a mistake that was. The beer ended up almost as bad as the first batch. Instead of dumping another batch I decided to try to salvage it by throwing in some roselare and letting it sit for a year. Six months later it was still pretty bad, but I began to realize one big problem was the candied ginger. It left a terrible after taste I couldn't stand. I did end up bottling about 6 bombers of it. Opened one about a year ago and it wasn't horrible. My wife thought it was ok. Sometimes you got to learn things by just being dumb.

 

[oakbarn]

Sneaker Beer. I stepped off a ladder into the Mash Tun. The beer was great! Next year it will be "Milkers" Beer as we now wear the rubber Milkers as the Mash was a "little" warm on my sneaker.

 

[jeff62217]

My worst accident was drunkenly knocking an empty onto a full glass carboy, busting a hole in the upper portion.

Luckily it was partially submerged in a swamp cooler, so the mess was contained... but it did have an imperial stout in it. Expensive beer to lose.

Could've been worse and I replaced that carboy with a speidel plastic tank. If I should happen to break my other two glass carboys they'll be replaced by speidels or better bottles.

 

[Beernik]

1. I was doing an step-infusion mash by pouring boiling water into the mash tun to raise the temperature. Part of the PVC manifold separated and floated to the top.

So I reassembled the pieces and stuck it back together in the 155F mash, bare handed. That sucked.

2. First brewday, 9 years ago. I boiled 3 gallons and topped it off with 2 gallons of cold water. I had no way to cool the wort. I thought the two gallons of cold water would cool it off more. I waited and waited for it to cool to pitching temp. It got to be 3am. It was still 100F.

I pitched the yeast and went to bed.

I made acetaldehyde beer.

 

[myerstyson]

Broke my hydrometer taking a gravity reading in my doppelbock. Glass and lead balls everywhere in the carboy. So sad.

 

[treacheroustexan]

Forgot to use a campden tab and mashed too low and ended up with sub par beer. I'm just waiting for something really bad to happen...few years since I started and no real issues.

 

[ttaylor137]

I brewed a session IPA and dry hopped in the primary without a hop bag.....threw the pellets directly in the fermenter. I kegged (without filtering dry hop material) and carbed.....when I went to serve, the dip tube became clogged with the dry hop material.

My only option was to transfer to another keg. I have a crappy "smart siphon" in which you need to shake the thing to get it to siphon. I cut my arm on the edge of the clogged keg and BLED into the beer.

While I was distracted with the wound, I lost siphon with about 1/2 the keg to transfer. I could not get the siphon to start again......SO.....I just dumped the rest of the beer into a sanitized bucket and siphoned from there.

Carbed it up again and drank it all.....would not serve to anybody else for obvious reasons. The beer was fine....BLOOD RED SESSION IPA!

My friends and I say that if that didn't screw up the batch than nuthin will...LOL

 

[Gnomebrewer]

My worst was fermenting a brown ale in Winter, so had a heater plugged into a temperature controller to keep the ferment at 19C. I took the heater out for half an hour, but when I returned it, I accidentally plugged it straight into a power outlet on the wall rather than the temp controller. When I checked the next day, the room was sitting on about 42C (108F). That beer got dumped.

 

[Gervosa]

I decided to brew a lager when I was still pretty new to brewing. And not just any lager, a doppelbock. I had no idea that lagers and higher gravity beers require a lot more yeast, so I decided to pitch the same amount I was using for ales.
I had to leave for work the next day and was going to be gone for over a week. I had my wife check it the following evening and she told me it wasn't fermenting. I did some quick research and realized my mistake in no time. The next day, she took a trip to the LHBS and bought a bunch more yeast. She didn't mind, since she got to tell everyone there the rookie mistake I had made . She pitched the yeast in my absence and the beer still turned out well.

I've made a lot of lagers since then and am always sure to make a big enough starter and to use the yeast calculator.

 

[Vandulus]

In the days before I bought a wort chiller, I used to pour the hot wort into a glass carboy that sat in a tub of ice water. I had done it a few times before without any problems, but on my third batch I went to lift the carboy out of the tub and the bottom literally fell out! There was no sign that there was any problem when it was cooling as the glass sheared off exactly where the bottom was fused to the sides.

Not only did I get pissed since it was a major mess, waste of 5 gallons of good wort, and many lost hours of work, but mainly it was a carboy that my grandfather used to make wine in. The carboy was at least 30 years old! I've since learned my lesson and use a wort chiller for cooling.

 

[bendog15]

Most of my mistakes involve stuck sparges- I batch sparge in a tall round igloo cooler. And hey, I have been know to overload my grain bill from time to time!
But my most memorable mistake came from the malt extract kit days- I made a high alcohol amber, it was so dense the poor yeast most have been buried under all that fermentable sugar. After a few days of no visible fermentation, I started to get worried. I took the carboy out of the chest freezer and started to rock it, shaking it back and forth. Well you can guess what happened next- I painted my ceiling. Wort shot out of the carboy, blasting the airlock off, hosing my whole upper body and the wall. I managed to save about 2/3 of the beer.
Btw- the beer turned out great.

 

[JB_Brewing2]

When I started brewing in 1997, I used a 5 gallon glass carboy filled with water to obtain the correct amount of water for the 2nd extract recipe I was about to brew. Pouring the water from the carboy into the brew kettle would allow me to keep track of the correct water quantity. So...whilst pouring water into the BK, my hand slipped off the bottom of the carboy allowing it to come into catastrophic contact with edge of the kitchen counter. (Did I mention we had guests who up until this point were impressed with my ability to brew.) I was wearing an old t-shirt, a pair of new jeans worn for the first time and new wool socks. The mostly intact bottom of the carboy, with one long shard still attached, attacked the new jeans and continued on to impale the long shard vertically between my big toe and the toe next to it. Miraculously, just the sock was ruined. That wasn't the case where the fractured carboy bottom came into contact with the new jeans. The jeans were cleanly sliced open for approximately 8 inches with a resultant slice of the flesh of nearly the same length. Sutures and butterflies ensued and I still wear that scar today. Now I use nothing made of glass larger than a mason jar.

 

[geoffey]

In the days before I bought a wort chiller, I used to pour the hot wort into a glass carboy that sat in a tub of ice water. I had done it a few times before without any problems, but on my third batch I went to lift the carboy out of the tub and the bottom literally fell out! There was no sign that there was any problem when it was cooling as the glass sheared off exactly where the bottom was fused to the sides.



Not only did I get pissed since it was a major mess, waste of 5 gallons of good wort, and many lost hours of work, but mainly it was a carboy that my grandfather used to make wine in. The carboy was at least 30 years old! I've since learned my lesson and use a wort chiller for cooling.

Sorry to hear that. Shocked the carboy lasted as long as it did! That's a 170 degree temp change in seconds. Not good for glass. I'd bet any newer glass carboy would have shattered immediately.

 

[SEndorf]

The recipe said IRISH moss...... Not PEAT moss!!

 

[Kirkwooder]

I boiled a 6 gallon batch of my house IIPA last winter and set it on my snow covered picnic table with the immersion chiller hooked up and running. I thought that the 6" of snow would help the chiller drop the temp quicker.

Well, the table was sitting on a slight slope and there was about a 1/2 inch of ice under the snow coating the table top. As the snow under the pot melted, the melt water further lubed the ice under the brew pot, and caused my $50+ pot of IIPA to slide ever so slowly to the edge of the table and come crashing down, sending a geyser of hot wort, hops, and coil, spewing into the air like Old Faithful.

Luckily, or not, I was just far enough away to be a front row witness but not close enough to get drenched with hot wort, or save it. At the time I was fresh out of my favorite brew and flat broke. It was several months before I had the spare cash to spend on a batch of this beer.

 

[drainbamage]

Fairly early in my brewing exploits, I tried to make a Czech pilsner. Since I didn't have proper temperature control, I tried to just leave the carboy in the fridge for several weeks, which of course stalled the yeast stalled out halfway. When I went to bottle everything and left it to sit and room temp, the yeast woke back up. No bottle bombs (thankfully), but it was a whole batch of gushers.

 

[m00ps]

Easily my #1:
Ive always loved unibroue and tried to step up a bottle of their dregs. Little did I know that they filter and bottle with a champaign yeast. Cut to me trying to ferment a 1.080 belgian dubbel with champaign yeast. Led to an ENTIRE BATCH of bottle bombs. I remember putting on my leather jacket, 2 pairs of jeans, safety goggles, and winter gloves to carefully move them all into a cardboard box and they blew up one by one on my deck. I didnt touch that box for a year...

 

[lumpher]

I used to use a bottling bucket as a fermenter, and i didn't have a fermenting chamber at the time, so the bucket was sitting on the floor in a corner of my home office fermenting an ipa. a visitor didn't know to stay away from the bucket. he kicked open the spigot. i didn't notice for a few days. ruined the carpet and padding, lost the ipa, and i ended up tearing up the flooring and laying down tile in the office. the office sure gets a cold floor in the winter now...

 

[david_42]

When I was first getting started, my friend had purchased the makings for a rye IPA; except he bought twice as much rye as the recipe called for. The resulting "mash muffin" was consigned to the compost heap. We were close enough the the brew store that we salvaged the day with a simple extract IPA.