Homebrewing epic fails

Brewed a Hefeweizen and had it fermenting upstairs as the basement was too cold. Woke up to find that not only the airlock blew off the bucket but also the lid. The lid was 5 feet away from the bucket and the airlock was in the next room. It took me a while to clean up the yeast explosion off the ceiling, walls, and floor. To this day I have not seen a yeast as active as wyeast 3068.

 

Got a hot foot by pouring hot water into the mash tun for preheating and forgot to close the ball valve.

 

Put 0.75 gallon of a raspberry puree apple cider into a 1 gallon carboy to ferment without a blowoff tube. Came home from work the next day with raspberry puree exploded on every surface. I thought at first someone shot themselves in my kitchen.

 

Nothing too major, but right after doughing in my mash a couple brew days ago, I put the lid on the cooler and went to lift it off the floor to the counter and the ball valve got caught on my shorts as I was lifting and opened the valve sending hot water right into my inner thigh. Took everything not to drop the cooler. Of course an hour later I had a stuck sparge.

The silver lining is that I learned that a Thermapen works well in dislodging a stuck sparge.

 

Poured 180 degree water with PBW all over my chest and stomach two weeks ago while cleaning the HERMS and Therminator after brew day. Thankfully, I escaped with some minor burns and one nice blister on my stomach.

 

HA!
That reminds me of the first time lifting a full 9 gallon kettle from the floor to the stovetop after the sparge, and the painful consequences of not planning for valve clearance.

 

Ouch!!

 

Haven't brewed a ton of batches yet but the last one was a complete nightmare from start to finish. Made a starter the day before, it already had a high Krausen in 4 hours and
I knew I probably should have turned down the stir plate. Woke up to a mess all over everything the next morning.

Thought I had a couple different specialty grains that I ran out of or a mouse had chewed a hole in as I hadn't put them
In Tupperware yet (brew in my garage) so had to change a few things on the fly.

Mash PH ended up a touch low. Tried to adjust PH of Sparge water with Just Lactic for the first time and add Sparge salts to kettle instead. THAT was a learning process!

Finally everything seems to be going Ok. I brew with a Grainfather and decided to ditch the hop spider and just throw all the boil/whirlpool hops in and see what the pump
could handle. BIG MISTAKE

Somewhere along the line the filter has come completely dislodged! Start to run wort through the counter chiller and its pumping straight gunk! I thought oh maybe I had knocked the plastic cap off the filter. Grab the paddle to feel around and nope the whole filter is just floating around in the bottom. FUQ! Can't chill the wort now as the counter flow chiller is completely clogged. Thermomometer says it's 140... I ended up putting the whole Grainfather in my beer fridge downstairs. Meanwhile I have to try to figure out how to get the counter flow chiller and the GF pump unclogged. After multiple differnt attempts I end up hitting both with my air compressor. Needless to say I now have sticky hop gunk in a nice spray pattern all over my garage from counter flow chiller. After that I wait 15 minutes and the wort has gone down to 126. I'm like screw it (it'a close to midnight by now) so I grab a large contractor garbage bag spray it with starsan, put on the thickest glove I can find, pull my sweatshirt over the glove, stick my arm in the garbage bag then down into the hot wort to get the filter back in place. This took a few attempts but I finally got it. Phew. Wort is starting to cool, thinking we're all good. I leave for a few minutes and come back to find the large bin that my counter flow chiller discharge water is flowing into has started to overflow and is now all over the floor! Now I just start to laugh. Go to hook up my FTSS tubes to the fermentor and grabbed the wrong ones (I have two, one was set up for cooling, the other heating) switch on the controller and sprayed water all over the laundry room for a few seconds! Laughing harder now. Finally get the wort into the fermentor, aerate, pitch, do some minor cleaning and call it a night at around 1:30. If this batch doesn't get infected it will be a minor miracle.

All came down to shitty planning, starting way to late and trying to do to many things at once. I think I only had two beers during the process. I probably would have given up if I'd had a few more.

 

^ Wow.

In other news - my original post in this thread about my garage collapsing - It is back up and operational! Along with a few new upgrades!

Will post a picture at some point. Brewing this weekend!

 

Shit happens. As of August 2016, I've been brewing at home for 45 years, and every once in a while I'll still have a day when it seems the brew gods just seem pissed off at me for some reason. But somehow, even in the worst cases, I still somehow always managed to make beer in the end (even when I had a batch of beer go sour in the keg, I turned it around by keeping it, and adding pasteurized portions of it to a few batches of stout I made subsequently. I also used some of it for cooking, as a marinade for cheap cuts of beef...the results were amazing.)

Sometimes you just have to "roll with it" and learn from the mistakes/disasters. Take good notes, improvise a bit when necessary, and don't give up!

 

i'm 47, so I have to ask where you got brew supplies 45 yrs ago and what you fermented in.

 

Just like the real fact that there were actually some very good (and even some world class) quality commercial beers back in those days (contrary to the hype which the current industry wants you to believe), there were also sources for brewing supplies (though definitely not nearly the selection available to us today).

For my first batches, I bought cans of Blue Ribbon malt Extract in a supermarket in Storm Lake, Iowa ( a 3 lb can of pre-hopped extract cost roughly $3.25... and it was a standard item in the baking section of the supermarket back then). I fermented in an old stoneware crock at first, but started using a plastic bucket later (later switching to glass, which I still use). For that first batch, I also bought a bag, because the instructions I had said that I needed it.

The friend who helped me with that first brew made a very prescient suggestion: he suggested that I skip the sugar and just use 2 cans of extract instead. He had never brewed before, but simply reasoned that it would very likely turn out better with more malt instead of using any white sugar.
It was a very smart suggestion...and that (along with some plain, dumb luck) could very well be the main reason my first batch came out good enough to keep me interested (ie., it actually tasted like beer!).

By the time I moved back home to NJ a year and a half later, I learned that a Wine Hobby USA store (which also sold brewing ingredients) had opened up less than 5 miles from my hometown. From then on, I was really hooked...and about 15 years later (in the mid '80s) I took the logical next step and switched to all grain. That step (as well as having previously switched to 'wet' yeast) made a huge difference and since that time, I have managed to brew fairly regularly... about every 8 weeks or so, and sometimes more ...(except during periods when I was on the road touring with shows or working on location in film and TV projects).
Brewing has been my 'treehouse'...it keeps me sane in the very insane and unpredictable business I'm in, and keeps me well stocked with the kinds of brew I prefer (and as an added bonus, it saves me a ton of money in the process compared to commercial 'craft' beers).

 

Wouldn't call it an epic fail, but still a blunder. I made my first homebrew yesterday morning. A basic beginner (actually listed as intermediate) kit saison. Seemed pretty easy to follow instructions. At time of transferring to fermentor and cooling down wort, the coil cooler plastic tubing popped off the copper coil from the water source, and started sending water all over the place. Pants leg got soaked and it dumped another ~.15- .25 gallon of fresh well water into my fermenter before I could shut the water off in time to reconnect the hose.

Fermenter was bubbling this morning so at least I know my first beer attempt will have some % of alcohol in it at minimum, even if it tastes lousy! :-)

 

So, I need a little help analyzing my last batch of beer and this seemed like a good place for that.

My brewing resume… I have about 10 all-grain batches under my belt spread over a very long period of time. I hadn’t brewed for the last 9 years until I tried an all-grain Three Floyd's Alpha King Pale Ale clone back in June. That one actually turned out pretty decent (considering the long layoff).

Then, a few weeks ago I tried to brew a clone of what is probably my favorite beer of all-time, Russian River Blind Pig IPA. It just didn’t work.

The grain bill for the Blind Pig clone…

Malt – 2-row pale malt (7 lb.), C-40 (1/2 lb.), Cara Pils (1/2 lb.), and white wheat (1/4 lb.).
Boiling Hops – Chinook, Columbus, and Cascade.
Finishing Hops – Cascade, Amarillo, and Simcoe.
Dry Hops – Cascade, Amarillo, Simcoe, and Centennial.
Yeast – Wyeast American Ale 1056

After fermenting about 2 weeks in a carboy and another 3 weeks in the bottle, the carbonation is adequate enough to make it drinkable, but it is far from an IPA. It looks and tastes more like a brown ale. Perhaps even a Schwarzbier. Very dark. While I have very little sediment in the bottle, you cannot see through this beer at all. It looks more like coffee. For color I was expecting about a 9 or 10 on the SRM chart but it is closer to 31 or 32.

Taste-wise I get mostly malt and very little hop taste. Also, there does not seem to be a great deal of alcohol. The target OG was 1.067 and target FG was 1.017. I forgot to get an actual OG but my actual FG was 1.006. The alcohol content is supposed to be about 6.5%. Normally, 24 to 36 oz. of a 6.5% beer will give me a little bit of a buzz. I can have 2 or 3 of these and nothing happens.

On my next batch I will pay extra attention to all of the normal things and make sure everything is clean and sanitized, etc., but I was just wondering if anybody has any other not-so-obvious suggestions for me. Thanks.

 

Put a space heater WAY too close to my beer in the ferm chamber. Came back to something the resembled bread as much as beer.

 

I built a ferm chamber using a chest freezer and an STC-1000. Never really tested what would happen if power was cut. So after completing a beer I shut the controller off and left the freezer open to aid in drying out any condensation.

Well a few days later we lost power briefly. Upon coming back on so did the controller.

I don't think I realized for at least a week. I ended up with inches of water and mold growing in the freezer. Luckily the temp probe was there and the water would get cold enough that it gave the compressor a little bit of a break.

Needless to say I now unplug the unit when it's not in use.

 

1. Left a yeast cake in a closed bucket for over a week then used it on ahoppy IPA with 17 oz of hops, infected so bad the stink needed a lava soap treatment to get it off my hands.
2. During a Drunkin Brewer Series we added,I think, 25 lb of base malt and 5 lbs of cane sugar to a otherwise nasty smellin mix. There might have been 1.5 gallons of awful beer left after the blowoff stopped blasting out beer.
3. And the worst for last there I was at a pals b day party where he proceeds to build up my brewing skills to all around, then pops open a hoppy IPA which had way too much bottleing super and hop dust in the bottleing process. Well that sucker shot out of the bottle and the dude tried to put his hand over the top which did nothing but spray beer on everybody nearby. Rather embarrassing .

 

Here's a recent one:

Brewed a Belgian Dark Strong yesterday with Wyeast 3787. The brew day itself went wonderfully. Stuck my fermenter in my ferm chamber and let her go to town. What I didn't realize is that my controller was set to warm rather than cool, so the freezer never turned on to control temps. Woke up this morning went and checked on it and the beer was sitting at a cozy 95°F.

Needless to say, I'll be dumping this batch and starting over. At least I can top crop the yeast.