"Doh!!" Moment when brewing?

I remember I dropped the lid O-ring into a full keg and sprayed my arm with starsan and fished it out. Ended up drinking the beer fast enough but that was a definite DOH moment.

 

Another time I weighed my dry hops down with a rock from the garden. That didn't work out as well

 

That happened to me one time early on in my brewing. It's one of the few occasions I was happy to have carb drops on hand. I don't make a habit of using them, but in this case you could still make your priming sugar for the rest of the batch, and just use drops on the 6 bottles that were already filled.

 

That's what I did. Ever so slightly high efficiency and OG. Ended up being my best beer yet.

 

Yea this has happened to me as well. I got about 30 bottles in before I remember priming. I put about a half a teaspoon of table sugar in each bottle and recapped. It basically worked fine, a couple had some strange levels of carb.

 

Everybody's done that at least once. I've never lost a whole vial but I've made a few messes that way.

One time I froze a 4L lager starter in my chest freezer. Left the probe outside the freezer while clearing space for the starter, forgot to put it back in. Probably $20-25 down the drain, literally. And postponement of brew session. D'oh!

 

That's a good one. A true Homer Simpson moment. Heck, just opening a bucket and giving it a good whiff the first time is a Homer moment, but you went way over and beyond.

I've had lots of "D'oh!" moments brewing. Some better than others, but lots. Seeing the sugar for bottle conditioning setting on the stove, right where you left it, right as you put the LAST bottle cap on is a really good one. Everyone will probably do that one sooner or later if they bottle. Gave me an excuse to try those bottle conditioning tablets. I got the malt based ones. They taste like malted milk balls, quite crunchy! They do work, I suppose, but there are better ways to condition your beer. Like putting the sugar in BEFORE you bottle.

 

What barrel? Balcones 5 gal? And how long you aging it for? I'm about to make my stout this week, and was told only to let it sit in the barrel for 2 weeks or so, since it will be the first run after the barrel was drained.

 

My "doh" moment came about 3 months agao after I just got done boiling the DME for a yeast starter, and my wife happened to call while I was in the middle of "messing with shit" and I inadvertently dumped a fresh yeast vile into a boilng hot flask of starter wort.

Needless to say I did not brew the next day.

 

A guest at our house almost had a very bad D'oh! moment when they mistook a yeast starter I was working on (in a plastic jug) for a big jug of apple juice. They had gotten a glass of ice and had already started pouring when I spotted the transgression in progress. Given how much of a pain in the ass that person turned out to be, I should have let them drink it.

 

I was racking to my bottling bucket and saw it had water in it. What the heck, I dumped it and sanitized. Doh!! that was the priming solution.
Now I have a beer when I'm cleaning up, not when I'm brewing.

 

Did you run hot water through the barrel first? That should help with the evaporation problem. Yeah I'm gonna do 6 gal and blend as needed to my liking. Cheers!

 

only been at it for a little over a year so I can say my biggest d'oh! moment was realizing I forgot to add whirlfloc.
Also forgot to check if I had caps last week. AFTER getting nearly everything ready for bottling.

adding dry hops to a standard (narrow mouth) glass carboy in a bag is always a PITA later, does anyone just throw dry hops right into the carboy (pellets or whole?)

 

One time during the chilling phase the wort in tubing popped off my counterflow chiller. I thought the best thing to do was to plug the hose of boiling hot wort with my thumb. Ended up with a nice blister and the knowledge that shutting the kettle valve works just as well.

 

Just dump them in and use a nylon sack over your siphon. Makes racking a very easy.

 

I don't have anything crazy just a bunch of small things along the way.

Burned my wrist pretty bad trying to reach over a starter wort boiling in a flask. The steam was so concentrated coming out the top that it got me good. This was after I burnt my finger doing the same thing.

1/4 of a bucket of sanitizer solution falling from around 4 feet to my kitchen floor.

2x One of my headphones falling into the wort. When I oxygenate the wort I get down on one knee. As I go to stand up the cord catches my knee and yanks the ear bud out of my ear into the wort. I have to remind myself every time now to take it out before starting.

I usually have the exit tube of my immersion chiller on the sloped portion of my drive way so the water will trickle all the way down to the storm drain. One time it wouldn't reach and end up disturbing an ants nest on the side of the drive way. Spent the rest of the chill time defending my wort from angry ants. They were all over the place trying to climb up the tube into the kettle.

Was filling my kettle with hot water to let it soak in my kitchen. One of the last things I do on brew day. Went outside to gather the last of my equipment and lost track of time. When I came back in the kettle had been over flowing for a minute. Water got all over the place and into my lower cabinets. The last 5 minutes of clean up turned into an hour+.

First time brewing turned my burner on before the propane tank. The safety kicked in and caused it to let less propane through the line. Took me an hour to get to a weak boil. Started drinking a 22oz of DIPA right when I started and ended up drinking during the rest of the 4-5 hour brew day for 1 extract batch. When I finished I was tired, half drunk and dejected. Found out on this board a couple days later what I did wrong and the batch ended up ok.

 

I love that feeling of finishing up a brew day and going to bed all relaxed with a feeling of accomplishment. And the childlike sense of wonder you get when you wake up the next day and see your hard work bubbling away vigorously. But not the annoyance you get at lunch when you look over your notes and don't see any gravity readings.

To make it worse, the last time I did this was for a huge barleywine that was supposed to end up as a 1.124 monster... as a 5 gallon batch... but I got carried away chasing malliard reactions and boiled it for 3 hours leaving me with ~3. Gulp.

Online estimator put the potential alcohol between 16-21% (wlp099 goes to 25, so that's possible!) depending on my efficiency. But I'll never know for sure. All I know is the sample I tasted was pretty hot.

 

When I was bottling a couple days ago my siphon hose slipped off my bottling wand. That made a lovely pink mess of things.