Ok…I have been going to post this for a few weeks now and decided to go ahead and show my ignorance. I brewed both a 2nd crack coffee stout and a Brickwarmer Red Ale back in early November. I had great expectations for both and they were my first extract kits in at least 2 years as I normally do all grain. Well, brew day came and went with no issues. I did not add the coffee to the stout as the directions had stated to do. After reading some posts here and getting a few suggestions I did a cold brew of the coffee and added it to the keg and just siphoned the beer right on top of it…well…I accidentally siphoned the Red Ale on top of the coffee instead of the Stout :oops:
I guess the good news is that they both are tasty individually and really good mixed 50/50. Just not what I had set out to achieve!!
I hope everyone else had a great year of brewing! :cheers:
I don’t see it as failure. I know what your intent was. What you have tho is two drinkable beers, plus you now know what these ingredients are capable of by crossing things up. Your taste buds will remember what you did, which is an experience. kind of a self-teach thing. Right these things down in your notes for reference, and don’t beat your self up, OK?
Just to be clear, I am totally “ok” with my lack of attention to detail which caused this. I just thought it would be good to share my mistake with everyone. This was actually my worst and only “fail” in brewing this year if memory serves me correctly so not a bad year what so ever!! At least I still have drinkable beer that actually is pretty good mixed.
Cheers to 2014 and May 2015 be better to each and everyone on this site! :cheers:
I did a cherry hefe a year or two ago. I’m still not sure where I went wrong. It was the color of a used band-aid, and tasted more like pits and skins than cherry. If it were just a little worse, I probably could have dumped it with a clear conscience. But no, It was just barely drinkable, and my frugal “no wasting” upbringing kicked in. So I choked my way through both cases. I could practically hear my mother saying, “So the flavor is off, it’s still perfectly good; there are sober children in China who I’m sure would love to have it…”
I’m sure those sober children in china would love to drink your barley drinkable beer. I bet there’s kids on your street that would drink it also . I learned the hard way when I tryed to choke down 20 gallons of beer that did not taste right. The only thing worse then dumping a bad batch is trying to drink it. But it’s bound to happen to all of us. That was my epic fail for 2014. Dumping back to back batches was tough to swallow, literally.
My epic fail just occured this past Saturday. I kegged a Ruination clone 4 weeks ago and set it at serving pressure to carb naturally. I checked on it after 2 weeks and only minimal carbonation…not much better after 3 weeks so I bumped the pressure up to 12 psi. Whilst doing some laundry Saturday mornng I decided to pull a pint and see what that sucker looked like. FOAM and then AIR…WTF??? Popped the lid open on keezer to investigate further and found 5 gallons of beer inside. Turned out being the swivel nut on my liquid line wasn’t properly tightened to the disconnect. Totally my fault as I was in a hurry to finally get my 4th keg on and call the keezer “full”. Sucks becasue the last batch I brewed of that stuff was phenominal.
Just today, I was transferring my Spiced Winter Ale to secondary. (I’m using a secondary so I can add mulling spice, and still harvest the yeast for next weekend’s brew.) The spices went into the secondary, and half way through racking I realized I was ACTUALLY racking my Megalodon on to the Mulling spices.
I’m not sure how my Christmas Vacation brew schedule will recover, but I’m actually thinking a Spiced Winter Megalodon could be quite a happy accident.
. I learned the hard way when I tryed to choke down 20 gallons of beer that did not taste right. The only thing worse then dumping a bad batch is trying to drink it. But it’s bound to happen to all of us. That was my epic fail for 2014. Dumping back to back batches was tough to swallow, literally.
