What were your rookie mistakes

I was bottling a 22 gallon batch into 220 bottles and I was doing 5.5 gallons at a time in the bottling bucket. When I was cleaning up, I realized I forgot the priming sugar in one of the buckets. That was right after my son sorted all the full bottles by height and bottle type so the 55 unprimed bottles were mixed in with the other 165 quite well. There was no way to tell them apart until a few weeks later when some were not carbed. :oops:

First time making a cider, I wanted to boil the honey before adding it to the fermentor. Not recognizing it as a beer, I poured the near boiling liquid into a better bottle carboy before cooling. It shrunk to about 3/4 it’s normal size because of the heat and the cider and the bottle were ruined. Doh!!!

Brewed my first couple all-grain batches with RO water and no pH or flavor ion adjustment. My beer improved considerably after I fixed that. Also brewed several batches without any attempt to control fermentation temp.

My first batch was kinda lousy from following bad advice. I pitched at too warm of a temp, then dropped the temp to finish fermentation, resulting in a diacetyl bomb. I then primed with the full 5oz of sugar and ended up with way too much carbonation.

Otherwise, my biggest mistake was forgetting to close the ball valve on my mash tun when filling it. I wish I could say I’ve only done it once. Oh yeah, I brew barefoot too :frowning:

[quote=“erockrph”]
, I brew barefoot too :frowning: [/quote]

I feel like this one should be in How to Brew: “Always wear shoes.” --John Palmer.

Doesn’t that look authoritative and helpful?

Forgetting to put the manifold in the m/t before adding 21 lbs of grain and a ton of hot water. Man that sucked.

Not knowing that post fermentation reading with a refractometer need to be converted. Spent the next couple of days checking the gravity till I read here it needs to be converted. :cheers:

Adding MLE to the pot, then hearing the funny sound of scorching telling me that I might want to do some stirring…

Had plenty; but my most annoying rookie mistake happened just yesterday in my 20th year of brewing. Earlier in the week I realized that my pipeline was shot. I had a corny of a decent American wheat tapped and maybe two cases of assorted Belgians bottled. I needed to get some beer in my six empties. So Tuesday I weighed out, crushed, and labeled the hops and grains for four different batches I was hoping to make Thursday through Sunday.

Thursday sailed through an Irish Stout. Saturday I banged out a Saison and a Rye IPA. Sunday I didn’t bang out anything; a simple Pale Ale almost banged me out.
I heated my strike water, emptied in my bucket of grains, stirred and stood dumbfounded staring at 9.5 lbs of hot, wet, uncrushed grains. It was only then that I remembered that I had ran out of time Tuesday and never got to crush the fourth batch.

But I wanted that fourth batch. So I drained the grains and ‘milled’ them in a food processor, two cups at a time. What a PITA. I needed a few attempts at reheating the strike water to get the mash temp right. Eventually I got my wort hopped, boiled, and cooled.

But the brew day from hell wasn’t quite done with me yet. To add insult to injury I dropped and broke my hydrometer so I have no idea of the O.G. I pitched into.

I so want to taste this pig.