Brewing Mistakes

Early one brew day I dose'd the mash with isinglass instead of lactic acid . . . didn't realize the mistake until putting away the chemicals. This goof-up is offered publicly to salve your wounds . . . the really bad goofs go to my grave.

 

- Higher mash pH (because calcium carbonate would raise pH rather than lowering)
- Less rounded maltiness (due to less chloride than you planned)

 

Have you measured the pH of your mash?

One motivation of adding Calcium Carbonate is to raise pH. One motivation of adding Calcium Chloride is to lower pH. Was your measured mash pH too high?

Cheers!

 

“….amazingly the beers taste ok, and got decent efficiency on most of them.”

Well, that is important.

I suppose as an exercise you could re-do your entries in the tool with the correct information and see what pH it predicts. That would be interesting to know.

Cheers!

 

haha, don't forget to prime your beer before bottling

 

Don't forget to have caps before bottling

 

I've used the wrong mason jar of yeast at pitch time. I used a Hefe yeast instead of an English yeast. I didn't realize it until about a week later. Banana milk stout didn't come out at good as it sounds like it could. Maybe next time I'll throw a few fist fulls of PB2 at it.

 

Biggest mistake...thinking you can brew quality beer by using campden to correct or improve any municipal water taste.

 

I got all my mash in my tun, added strike water.......forgot to attach my bazooka tube.

That was a fun day.

 

I've done this twice. Forgetting to put the recently cleaned false bottom back in the tun. I chalk it up to being the first thing I do, and normally very early in the morning.

 

I've done this twice, too. On back to back batches, brewed no more than a couple weeks apart.

Recently, I've consistently forgotten to add yeast nutrient. So consistently that I've had an unopened bottle of nutrient in my fridge for months now.

Then last weekend I brewed a very malt-forward beer and got my chloride:sulfite ratio reversed. I was thinking that under 1 was good for malty accentuation when I brewed. It wasn't until last night that I realized my mistake.

 

Missed cleaning some of my bottles when bottling an extra pale ale. 1 week later, tried popping the top on one and the cap shot off faster than any champagne cork ever would. Missed my face by just a few inches, and I still have no idea where that damn cap went. Needless to say, the other non-sanitized bottles were infected as well, and were either gushers or bottle bombs. Since I had no idea which bottles I cleaned, and which ones I didn't, I was handling them all with safety glasses and chain mail (ok.. not chain mail), but those shards of glass can really fly. The rest of them tasted great though! Here's the damage:

 

When I first started brewing, I always remembered to check the original gravity, since I have moved I have forgotten to check it on about 8 batches.

 

Sheesh. You could make a comedy film out of all the stupid mistakes I've made. But my biggest mistake was probably the time I ruined a 5L starter and a cornie keg full of beer. I was getting ready to do a Baltic porter or some other really big lager, and it required a really big starter. So I thought, I'll just make it in a carboy, cold crash it, and drop the wort in there. So I made a 5L starter, let it ferment out, and cleared a space in my kegerator to cold crash it. While I was doing this, I pulled the temp probe out of the kegerator to make room... and forgot to put the probe back in. I came back the next morning to find the starter and one cornie that happened to be in there frozen solid. A total waste of the time, money, and effort it took to make that beer and starter, and it also meant I had to delay brewing the Baltic porter until I could get more yeast and make another starter. D'oh!

Hope you feel better now.

 

I had one brewing session where I made so many mistakes I almost gave up.

Was making a Milk Porter (partial-mash) and forgot to add chocolate malt
Then realised that I had miscalculated and couldn't fit all the grains into the one container to mash
Then accidentally mashed at 60C instead of high 60's
Then realised that my normal way of sparging wasn't going to work, so had to do a dodgy multiple batch sparge
Then added ~10% less bittering hops I was supposed to
Then added 50% more lactose than I was supposed to
Then realised I hadn't actually boiled & cooled enough water to make up the rest of the brew

I tried to fix each problem after the fact, but overall it was a disaster. Fortunately the finished product was actually not too bad (although a bit too sweet, and not as chocolatey as planned), probably around a B- mark.

 

The biggest tragedy of my homebrewing mistakes is how it all seems to be going so well until the end. I have misfired on bottle priming a lot, ranging from no carbonation to gushers. Over-priming was very painful on an imperial red I made, watching 1/4 to 1/2 of each bottle froth into the sink.

 

This is like every batch I've done, thankfully they've all turned out at least drinkable.