Post your screw ups and what you learned from them

If you don't brew at your own house and you use a chest freezer with a temperature controller, make sure the temperature probe is inside of the chest freezer every time before you leave the home brewery. If not you could easily end up freezing your carboys or nearly boiling them depending on the season

 

Freezer chest w/a two stage controller. Oh crap I forgot about this.

I plugged the blacked out light bulb for heating without telling the controller to switch from cooling to heating. Luckily I caught it in time.

What did I learn? I'm a dumb-shit. But what else is new.

 

Always label your stored yeast or you might end up pitching wy3068 into a robust porter or 3522 into an APA.

 

My biggest screw up was adding yeast to the wrong fermenter. I was brewing two batches in one day. So my dubbel got the Westmalle strain and the Chico strain. I didn't have any extra yeast, to pitch into my IPA, so I went to the LHBS, which only does dry yeast. For reasons that are too long to go into, I picked a Nottingham and a Windsor packet and pitched these into my IPA.

I learned that blending yeasts can yield positive results. OK. Not really a big surprise, but I had never blended yeasts before. The dubbel was less phenolic than it might have been. The fruity Windsor character was but more subdued. Both beers turned out fine.

And I guess I should say that I learned that its not a bad idea to keep dry yeast around. But I usually don't have any, so maybe I never really learned that lesson

 

if youre going to brew outside - maybe dont use the garden hose for your water source. unless you like your beers tasting like garden hose. ugh.

 

Looking for a strong carbonation via adding extra priming sugar = hand grenades....

 

Brews to be aged for over a year should be kept in glass carboys, not plastic buckets.... they have a tendency to fail over time....

 

I have learned to never use a cheap piece of junk electric thermometer. I thought I was mashing at 155, but I was actually mashing at 120 because it was reading wrong. I always double check the temp of the mash and sparge water.

 

recipes that call for Whirfloc don't call for you to dump the entire back in the boil.

 

The entire ... bottle? Doesn't the label say 1 tablet per 5 gallons?

 

My lesson learned, don't brew the day after daylight savings time begins if you have somewhere to go. I lost an hour of my planned brew day because I forgot to set my clock ahead in my brewing area. In trying to rush I pitched my yeast at 90* hoping for the best... I didn't get the best. Fusel alcohols galore.

 

Failing to be prepared to manage fermentation, and having a batch really take off unexpectedly. It was the first time I pitched onto a yeast cake from a previous batch. Blew off the bucket lid, made a huge mess, and the fermenting wort was way too warm.

Not an award winner, but at least I was able to drink the final result.

 

First brew ever, I left the steeping grains in during the entire 60 minute boil. There was absolutely no discernible tannin extraction.

 

used a 5 gallon carboy which did not have enough room for fermentation so it boiled over like crazy

 

Make sure you don't pump the auto-siphon too hard.
I did this once and the siphon blasted itself out of my fermenter getting a lovely pitch black wort all over my kitchen.

Make sure you stir up your priming solution well enough or you get bombs and duds. Never had a bomb yet but about 6 beers out of my last batch were flat.

 

Daylight savings aside, another take on the lesson to be learned is to delay pitching until your wort is down to temp, even if it means waiting a few extra hours, or even overnight.

When I make lagers, I want to start with the temp south of 50F. I'll chill with an immersion chiller until I reach tapwater temp, which is still ~15 degrees too high to pitch. I transfer to the fermenter, cover it, and stick the fermenter in the fidge until it cools to pitching temp. Then I pitch. This is typically 8 or so hours later.

The point is, I think we fear infection so badly that it makes us do things like pitch yeast in haste, when in reality, the danger of infection of post-boil wort that is sitting around for a while is pretty minimal, assuming proper sanitation and precaution is taken.

 

Arg! I did that once!

One time I needed to do a really big starter for lager I had planned. It was going to be too big for the flask I usually use, and I thought that rather than do a step starter it might be easier to just make a big simple starter in sanitized carboy, let it ferment out, then pour the wort in over the cake. So I made the starter, let it ferment, so far so good. Then I decided to cold crash it in the chest freezer that serves as my kegerator. I had to move some stuff around in there to make room, and I set the temperature probe off the side while I was doing it... then forgot to put it back in. Yep... froze the starter solid and wasted about 600 billion cells of WLP 830. Also froze the cornie keg that was in there, though the beer wasn't too bad once I got unfrozen and recarbed. Had to start all over again with the starter, which meant I couldn't brew that weekend, which meant it had to wait three weeks. It sucked!

So yeah, today's pro tip: keep your temp probe *inside* the freezer.

 

Don't brew during a heat wave when your chest freezer/ferm chamber and second fridge are both full of kegs. Its been a nightmare trying to play musical refrigerator with 8 full corny's, six ferementers and 99 degree weather in a 1910's craftsman house with no central cooling (e.g. a 90+ degree ambient).