You guys are the worst. “My beer turned out awesome.” “Great brew day!” “It’s not so hard.” Well fie and shame on you all.
No it’s really not so bad, but what about us poor amateur souls that occasionally have bad days, too? I say we start a thread dedicated to stories of disaster for the sake of commiseration.
Isn’t that every day?
“is my batch ruined!!!”
“is this a dumper???”
I’ve had some bad days. I just don’t publish them. 
I live by the saying “this to shall be beer” and “we are not trying to go to the moon”. Followed by RDWHABH.
I think with experience you learn that the mistakes that “ruined” your brew day are just the routine obstacles you have to deal with on an average brew day.
Hey, with only one exception, my ‘bad brew day’ (with patience) still turned into a beer that was better than what I could buy in the store, even if not what I had hoped for.
I was thinking along the lines of genuine screw-ups. Definitely not the bi-daily postings of “Did I ruin my beer?” More like the time I accidentally used Wit yeast for my heff then let it ferment at 95*F. Can you say hot alcohol.
Should I even admit that after 13+ years of brewing that I still make the occasional bad beer? This is a natural product with a lot of variables. When I have a bad one, I feel charged up to brew more. In another thread I was talking about my bout with brewing water and everything that goes with that. I went back and checked my notes from 2012 and found out that I brewed 58 batches of beer. Can you believe that? I brewed 1.11 times every week! I can’t say how many of those batches ended up as “experimental unpleasantries” but there were a number of them. Here’s my take… making beer is easy. Making good beer and very good beer is harder. Making very good consistently is even harder and making stellar beer consistently is even harder. Remember that we’re homebrewers and not all of us have miles of stainless steel counters, perfect conditions, unlimited time, etc. There are always threads that discuss the downside. No worries. Like the VW superbowl ad says… Don’t be no cloud on a sunny day! :lol:
^^
Where does it all go? That’s a lotta beer yet your writings are coherent.
I forgot to add the flame-out hops on a lager 3 weeks ago. I will dry hop them instead.
I have gotten a bad after taste on every light beer i’ve ever brewed: 2 cream ales,1 Irish blonde, 1 lefse blonde, and my first pilsner… I have an American lager that has great potential but for now I have only brewed darker beers and wheat beers well I’m getting better, though.
^^
Where does it all go? That’s a lotta beer yet your writings are coherent.[/quote]
LOL. First of all, in 2012 I had a “beerpocalypse” where my water filter cartridge went bad and started to ‘cough up’ everything it had filtered out before that. That alone ruined… brace yourself… 12 five-gallon batches of beer. Every one of them had this wicked, sharp astringency that was completely unbearable. This is a lesson for those of you who use carbon block filters and cartridges. Those things are supposedly only good for 6 months (not x amount of water but a time frame… 6 months). When you overuse them, they begin to bleed out whatever they filtered out before and the results aren’t pretty. Shame on me for not checking the water that was being filtered. I posted about that issue sometime in the middle of 2012. Otherwise, I do give beer away, take it to parties, homebrew gatherings, etc. and I also have a lot of friends, family and neighbors over so it does get consumed. My wife drinks it too which is good. Also, as I said, I had a number of others that did not come out as planned and my motto (stolen from some brewpub somewhere…) NO CRAP ON TAP took over. If I have a batch that I just know is doomed, it’s just taking up valuable real estate in one of my kegs so I retire it.
It seems something minor goes wrong on a lot of brew days, but catastrophic failure is rare. On my last brew day, I forgot to recirculate boiling wort through my pump, chiller and hose (to sanitize) until after flameout. Improvised.
Out of 22 batches, I consider 2 a failure. One was a witbier that I decided to add lemon peel to instead of orange peel. I added way too much. The friend I brewed it for couldn’t get enough of it, but I hated it. Lesson learned. The other one was a pale ale that tasted great after a couple weeks in the bottle. But after about 3-4 weeks, every single bottle tasted terrible. I eventually dumped them. I suspect an infection from the bottling process. Who knows…maybe I forgot to sanitize my auto-siphon or bottling bucket.
[quote=“kcbeersnob”]It seems something minor goes wrong on a lot of brew days, but catastrophic failure is rare. On my last brew day, I forgot to recirculate boiling wort through my pump, chiller and hose (to sanitize) until after flameout. Improvised.
Out of 22 batches, I consider 2 a failure. One was a witbier that I decided to add lemon peel to instead of orange peel. I added way too much. The friend I brewed it for couldn’t get enough of it, but I hated it. Lesson learned. The other one was a pale ale that tasted great after a couple weeks in the bottle. But after about 3-4 weeks, every single bottle tasted terrible. I eventually dumped them. I suspect an infection from the bottling process. Who knows…maybe I forgot to sanitize my auto-siphon or bottling bucket.[/quote]
The beer that I mentioned earlier also called for lemon zest. Not knowing what lemon zest was I just cut up and dumped two lemons into the primary :lol: if anyone is reading this, and hasn’t learned this lesson yet please just don’t ever do it. It’s awful.
Oh come on!
A bad day brewing is better than a good day working ANY DAY!
(Unless you are a pro brewer, then that just sucks)
[quote=“Hoppenheimer”][quote=“kcbeersnob”]It seems something minor goes wrong on a lot of brew days, but catastrophic failure is rare. On my last brew day, I forgot to recirculate boiling wort through my pump, chiller and hose (to sanitize) until after flameout. Improvised.
Out of 22 batches, I consider 2 a failure. One was a witbier that I decided to add lemon peel to instead of orange peel. I added way too much. The friend I brewed it for couldn’t get enough of it, but I hated it. Lesson learned. The other one was a pale ale that tasted great after a couple weeks in the bottle. But after about 3-4 weeks, every single bottle tasted terrible. I eventually dumped them. I suspect an infection from the bottling process. Who knows…maybe I forgot to sanitize my auto-siphon or bottling bucket.[/quote]
The beer that I mentioned earlier also called for lemon zest. Not knowing what lemon zest was I just cut up and dumped two lemons into the primary :lol: if anyone is reading this, and hasn’t learned this lesson yet please just don’t ever do it. It’s awful.[/quote]
I did the same thing once. Brewed something I was calling a citrus Wit. Planned on adding some lemon, lime, orange zest. Not much, just a little of each. I picked up the fruit for me and some extra for my wife who was making sangria for a party. I started zesting… and zesting… and zesting. No idea what I was thinking, but I ended up zesting 2 or 3 lemons, limes, and oranges. As I’m dumping the zest into my brew kettle with about 10min to go, me wife comes outside and says “Hey, didn’t you buy extra fruit for the sangria?”.
This must have been what my face looked like :shock:
Those who dared tasting it dubbed it “Pledge Wit”. The first batch I ever had to dump.
Worst day was a bottling day. Screwed up a Raspberry wheat that I ended up dumping into basement stationary tub. I’m on a septic system with a lift pump. Pump clogged from pulp. Sucked crock out with Shop vac. Bottom two inches I will refer to as the “black slop of death” which doesn’t smell until disturbed. The splash zone of a “BSoD” filled shop vac. is approx. 14’ in every direction and 3’ up the washer,dryer, water softner, freezer, and walls. 3 hours a 3 gallons of bleach it was cleaned up and I still hadn’t started brewing. Hope this makes you feel better. PS the Brittany discovered the mess on one of my trips to dump a tub of “BSoD”.
Airlock sniffer. Lily Belle
Is your entire septic system (entire house) on a lift pump? Or just the sink where you brew?
Just the basement stationary sink, clothes washer, and water softener drain.
I have the same, I’ll keep an eye on it.
Any screw-up is a good learning experience. I had a carboy inverted with 2 gals. of Oxy Clean on the kitchen table. My daughter came in and said there’s
water all over the floor.
Now I use a tub and a stopper that stays in place. :oops:
Having been self-taught some time ago, it took me too long to figure out how to pitch sufficient yeast, and keep my ferment temps down. If I screw up occasionally now, I’m afraid I have to admit it is still not guarding temp increase during initial fermentation phase. Getting the right yeast pitch is purty darned important, especially if you are letting beer temp ramp up on it’s own timetable.
Yeasts are very important in digesting waste. So when my saison started tasting a little too funky, I didn’t feel it was a total loss to flush it into the septic tank.
