Bottling day yesterday for a stout and an APA. Stout isn’t tasting so great (not infected, just off). Snapped spigot off of bottling bucket trying to remove hose. Bought new spigot today. It doesn’t fit the bucket. Switched hoses and used a 3/8" ID hose with auto siphon to bottle my APA. Figured I’d just rack to a bucket, then use the siphon again with a wand on the end to bottle. Might have been fine, but the 3/8" ID hose on an auto siphon is no good. Bubbles in the hose the whole time I’m racking, stopped three or four times trying to fix. Wasted about a gallon of beer. The remaining 4 1/2 gallons is now overprimed and aerated. This beer, of course, tasted great. Probably the best I’ve made. Probably ruined with a combination of being overprimed and oxidized. I’m going to drink a couple glasses of this delicious, flat beer and stew… then try to siphon my beer into bottles. Beats throwing a carboy against the wall I s’pose.
:evil:
You may be surprised, some of the beers that I thought I messed up the worst turned out to be my very best. I’ve learned over the years that it’s actually incredibly difficult to mess up beer. I’ve made just about every mistake you can, and I honestly can’t think of a single batch that I would consider “ruined”; and I’ve done it all. My worst offense? Once my autosiphon wasn’t working, so I had to use gravity siphon. I couldn’t get the siphon started, so I resorted to sucking the tube, which then resulted in a mouth full of beer, which by reflex (from my aquarium days) I immediately spit out… right into the bottling bucket. And of course, once the siphon was going I realized the tubing was cracked at the midsection (which explains why I had trouble getting it started) which resulted in a crap ton of bubbles in the transfer. I also overprimed that batch, because I lost some volume in the transfer. That beer turned out to be fantastic. No sign of infection or aeration or anything. Not one of my best, but even with a flawless bottling day I don’t think it would have been any better. The one thing that I’ve found that is easy to mess up on and really makes a difference is temperature control. The worse beers I made (which weren’t even dumpers themselves) were my first few batches that fermented at around 70 degrees.
So I guess what I’m saying; RDWHAHB. :cheers:
Thanks brother, needed that! At least a majority of beer made it to the bottle, so there’s that. Glad to be done with it for the night though! :cheers:
