Lets hear your things went horribly wrong stories

I harvested two different Belgian yeasts to make a blended-yeast pitch. But each strain was difficult in restarting from the dregs. Spent about a week before I could get the two different yeasts out of dormancy. Then I had all my Erlenmeyer flasks out (big, med, small) trying to step-up my quantity. To meet my brew deadline I get up at 6AM to decant and re-pitch the yeasts into larger flasks. This involved cleaning the flask I just pitched from before adding the second yeast. I filled the now empty but dirty flask with water and got a large pinch of PBW to start the soak . . . but in my sleep-stupor put the emulsifier in the flask with active yeast. Of course the PBW wasn't bothered by my fragile yeast and started its effervescent action to polish up the flask.

I immediately called the Poison Control Hotline (number is on the PBW container). They said I was the first call they had that day and the first "yeast emergency" they had ever taken. Spent a little time reviewing the consequences of PBW and was told as cleaners go it wasn't that deadly looking. But they suggested I call PBW headquarters and gave me their number. They are in Colorado, so it was several hours before they would come to work. So I'm sitting there, worrying about my fragile micro-friends and how they will survive when a krausen started to form on the PBW'ed flask. It got bigger. Gave it a shake and had a decent amount of off-gassing . . . the yeasties were not only surviving but in good shape. Finally talked to their tech-rep and while they weren't yeast-literate did confirm that you could eat PBW and not have much more than a mild "caustic" after taste.

I now handle my PBW like a loaded shotgun until I have my coffee . . . not afraid, but with respect.

 

FUNNY! I can just imagine the EMTs with tiny oxygen masks for all of those little yeasties.

 

My two worst goofs involve a fermentation bucket bomb of a Samiclaus clone recipe (before I understood anything about blow-off tubes) and a batch of root beer that began breaking/exploding bottles during carbonation. (Again before I knew anything about bottle bombs.) It's fun learning the hard way, but it's nasty cleaning up the messes.

 

Early in my brewing days, I was steeping a mesh bag full of grain on the stove. Little did I know, the bag was resting against the bottom of the kettle. All of a sudden, it burst open and several pounds of grain spilled out into all of the wort! The bag burned through. I went ahead with the steeping until it was done and ended up having to filter out all the grain using a metal screen. PITA

 

My father-in-law and I both got a 1 gallon beer making kit for Xmas 2015. Had a brew off with pride on the line. After bottling, I mistakingly put my bottles in the fridge... which of course made the yeast go dormant and my beer didn’t carb up. I didn’t test a bottle and took some to my in-laws house for the taste testing with my wife’s whole family. He poured his perfectly carbed and I poured mine flat as water. Embarrassing moment haha

 

It was 1980 something and the internet hadn't been invented yet, and the only information abut homebrewing came from the three page folded instruction sheet tucked under the lid of a can and kilo kit. I didn't consider that a can of LME and a yeast packet given to me as a present a couple Christmases previously might be stale or reduced in effectiveness. Or perhaps the yeast never was good in the first place. And I didn't consider that a batch of beer that had over 40% of its fermentables from table sugar and the rest from that old LME, fermented by old yeast in a (brand new) plastic kitchen waste basket might not really taste too much like those English beers I had grown fond of when I traveled to the UK for a semester abroad. And the instructions were so inadequate that it really didn't convey much information about sanitation. So in retrospect, it is not surprising that the 1 liter plastic soda bottles I re-used to carbonate the beer yielded cidery gushers.

While the beer was bad, as many first batches are, the embarrassment really stemmed from the fact that no one said anything about how bad it was. Either they were sparing my feelings or they thought this must be what homebrewed English beer is supposed to taste like. Probably both. The worst part about it is that my grandmother died during this time, and after the funeral, the extended family gathered at her home for sort of an impromptu wake. Apparently my dad had told one of the relatives that I had started brewing beer. Instead of saying "...and it's really really REALLY bad," and he drove home and brought back the bottles that had been in his fridge and served them up. So everyone's recollection of me as a homebrewer is bottle infected gushers of thin-cidery swill, served on the day we memorialized my late grandmother.

 

A few years ago I brewed an oatmeal stout for my friend. It was low gravity and the fermentation appeared to be done after a few weeks so I racked it to the bottling bucket with a typical dose of priming sugar and bottled away. About a month later my friend told me that he heard something in the basement and sure enough the bottles were exploding. It was pretty embarrassing. Luckily they were in his basement.
There’s also the time I woke up to find the fermenter lid 15 feet away from the fermenter and krausen on the ceiling and walls. But that beer turned out to be a great scotch ale