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What's your brewing disaster?

MikeinWA

Master Brewer
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I was making an imperial pilsner last night.  I added my copper coil wort chiller and turned on the hose.  I came out 10 minutes later to find the hose connection leaked a gallon and a half of water into the wort.  I had to reboil to sterilize and it's no longer an imperial pilsner.  Ugh, I was finished at midnight.

Do you have a brewing mishap to make me feel less of an idiot?
 
Im going to brew a Belgian Dubbel tomorrow and I was just grinding all my pre measured grains and spilled about 2 oz of grain. It was one of the character malts, not sure which one and I dont have any more so its gonna change my recipe a bit. Oh well RHAHB ;)
 
My worst disaster was when I was making a beer during the Christmas season and I decided I would throw a sprig of Christmas tree into my boiling wort. I figured spruce tips are used in beer and they are in the pine family so what harm could one little sprig do? Boy was I wrong!

After fermentation and bottling I took one sip and was blasted immediately by a strong pine sap taste. Needless to say I dumped the entire 5 gallons of beer one bottle at a time.

 
Heres one from my brother. Adding 2 pounds of peat smoked malt when the recipe called out 2 oz. Ending up tasting like a petting zoo smells. Needless to say no one wanted to drink it.
 
Don't know which was worse.

1. Bought a new hose, haven't bought one in almost 20 years and turned into a cheapskate when I saw the price.  Brewed 2 batches before I realized I paid no attention to whether or not the hose was made for drinking water.  Does anyone out there enjoy vinyl shower curtain flavored beer? Dumped 4 cases and threw out the bottles-they were coated in a layer of vinyl.

2. I must not have gotten all the water out of my immersion chiller before putting it up for the winter.  I didn't see the split in the copper before putting it in the boil kettle.  When liquid started coming out of the chiller I thought nothing of it, after all, water left in the coils always boils out as it is heated up.  I looked away, just for a couple of minutes and when I looked back green stuff was coming out of the chiller, and I thought "Wow there sure was a lot of mold or something growing inside the chiller, never seen that before."  Lost 2 gallons of a 5 gallon batch before I realized what a dipXXXX I was.
 
I tried overnight mash. Mixed the grist and water before bed to start the sparge when I woke up.

Big mistake.

You'd think a guy who worked in food service for over a decade would think that it's not a bright idea to create a situation where bacteria food is left between 40 and 140 for more than four hours. Yeah, you might think that. 

Awoke to find two (yes, I tried my experiment with two batches der dee der der) frothing buckets of sour mash. Perhaps if I was making bourbon this would have been a good thing, but I wasn't.

I went and finished them anyway only to pour the foul final product town the drain.
 
My biggest brewing disaster was a painful one.  Little over two years  ago, I was just getting into all grain.  During sparging I had the boiler on floor, mash tun cooler on kitchen chair and the hot liq cooler on chair sitting on top of kitchen table.  It's a little fuzzy why I was pouring 185 degree water into hot liq from a four quart suace pan, while standing on another chair, but anyway, the chair decided to give out from under me and the water hit my left foot.  Needless to say, "yeeoww!"
Ended up with nasty 2nd degree, maybe a little 3rd.  Being the true "never quit" no matter what brewer, I finished out my brew session ( my wife still just shakes her head) with my left foot in a bucket of ice water.  And the beer was awesome.  I have refined my brew techniques dramatically and now my brew sessions are much safer.
 
I was testing fermenting in a corny last year, I hooked up the blow-off tube to the liquid out and sealed-off the gas in.  Reverse of what I meant to due of course.  Walking down to the basement the next morning, I noticed a strong biscuit-like smell, only to step onto wet carpeting.  Still not sure what was going on, I opened the frig to find a pond of half fermented beer at the bottom.  Filled up all the vegetable trays which had all my extra grain stored in them.  I then realized something terribly bad had happened.  The fermentation had pushed the entire five gallons of beer right out of the keg, all over the basement floor, as if I hooked up the keg to co2 and left a tap open.

After a couple of weeks of wet vacuuming the carpet, that was the last of my corny fermenting experiments.  I still, every now and then, get that biscuit smell to remind me of my horrible mistake.



 
Those are some good stories  :)

Mine's not nearly as painful.  I had a corny keg of oatmeal stout in my chest freezer/cooler.  I use the picnic faucets on my kegs.  I was putting a 6.5 gallon carboy of freshly brewed beer in to ferment and unkowingly caught the faucet between me and the keg, causing it to depress the lever.  Little did I know it, but while I was wrestling with the carboy I was getting an oatmeal stout shower.  By the time I realized it, about 2 pints had sprayed on me and into the bottom of the chest freezer.  Had to pull everything out, sop up the beer and then wash the sticky residue out.  Now I pull the kegs out before putting in carboys.   ::)
 
OK that's some funny stuff!  Even funnier for me because I have burnt my foot, added too much of a specialty grain to ruin a beer and had half my beer leak, from my lack of attention, all over the floor.

Thanks for the stories! 
 
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