What has been your worst home brewing experience?

Recently had a pretty bad experience. I guess I moved a batch to secondary prematurely because the yeast that I harvested exploded on me when I opened the vial to reuse. I was trying to scrape the bits that did not get all over my apartment into a starter with a knife when I dropped the whole damn (un-sanitized) vial into the starter.

I was able to step it up fine and the starter seemed normal. Had to do an extra step and delay brew day because so much of the yeast was lost. Brewed and all seemed fine. Fingers crossed no infection shows up. It's a DIPA so here's hoping the hops and short shelf life work in my favor.

 

2 and 3 remind me of our recent exchange on the ease of kegging.

 

2 mishaps in 11+ years!

Meanwhile, how many threads have been created in this forum re: undercarbonated bottles, gushing bottles, or bottle bombs? (hint: way more than 2)

Yeah, sh!t happens. At least there're no shards of glass to sweep up or tweeze out of the ceiling!

 

This just happened last weekend. I finished boiling the wort and transferred into my glass carboy. I picked up the carboy to take inside and it slipped out of my hands and completely shattered on the concrete patio. A full day's work had gone to waste and clothes completely soaked in sticky wort. I am still wincing in pain over that one.

 

I recently had a Chocolate PB Milk Stout that I either bottled before attenuation was done, or had an infection. Gravity had been stable for a week or so, but I started to get worried when I opened the first one and it was overly carbonated. I put the cases in a plastic tub in to contain them if they carbonated any further. Then about 2 weeks after that I was brewing again and heard a huge pop in the basement. I knew instantly what it was... I tried opening a few bottles with gloves and safety glasses on, shielding myself, but with the extreme gushing, there's definitely some stout on the ceiling in the kitchen. Pitched the rest. Needless to say the wife isn't too happy... Still have to paint the ceiling.

 

Big Brew Day a few years ago (wort was supplied by the brewery, so it wasn't technically a 'homebrew' disaster. We'll call it a hybrid, of sorts). Brewed a ten gallon batch of a HopSlam clone. While rolling two carboys of what was affectionately described as 'Shamrock Shake' beer (it was bright green from, as I recall, nearly 2# of hops) out to the truck for the drive home, a local bike club swarmed over me to marvel at the liquid gold that I was pushing. Trying to maneuver through the crowd, I hit a bump and one of the carboys toppled off the cart and shattered, spilling its contents all over the walkway. I didn't cry until a month later when I tasted the other half. I had nailed it!

 

My worst day of home brewing is...
Better than any other day...always

 

Discussion in 'Homebrewing'
Started by MCBanjoMike - Sep 1, 2015

Share your dumbest brewing mistakes

 

I work second shift so i started bottling at 2 a.m. Don't know why but the blue chinese capper that comes with kits decided to snap the neck off the first bottle and break in half. I covered everything with plastic wrap and got 2 red baron cappers in the a.m. I'll find out next week if it's ok.

 

Lesson learned, bottle when your LHBS is still open. Had the same issue. The original capper went to
Shit in the middle of bottling. Luckily my friend had one I could borrow that day.

 

Whoa!!! I can see fruit guts across the room, unless that is just some type of print on the carpet. Let's just say it's fruit guts, it sounds cooler.

 

I've done a lot of these. I had the tubing pop off my dip tube ball lock fitting and being new to kegging I freaked out for a minute while 1 or 2 gallons shot out into my kegerator before I realized I just had to bleed the gas.
I've also dumped a beer it was supposed to be a California common. Still wondering if it was alright and I didn't give it enough time to clean up. And I've bottled a few batches I wish I'd dumped. It's nice reading everyone else's mistakes. A lot can go wrong

 

Have seen several mentions of needing to use a blow-off tube instead of an airlock, what conditions take place that make this switch necessary? I like the idea of storing your cases in some sort of storage bin with a lid, might do this all the time for precautionary reasons to avoid messes with carbonation flaws. Also, might be wise to sit your carboy in some sort of huge bucket too so that if it blew you could at least catch some of it.

 

Holy hell! very sorry for your loss.. I'm sure a lot of hard work and money went into making that beast. Something similar happened to me with a barleywine - was racking to the bottling bucket and forgot my spigot was in the 'open' position and lost a fair amount before realizing it was pouring out at the bottom. Not nearly as much as you though.

Thankfully the rest of your batch is salvage-able

 

1. Terrible crush on KBS clone grain bill. It was my first go with my barley crusher. Tons of grain, great coffee, great chocolate wasted. OG was 1.032... pouring that down the drain was a terrible lesson, but glad I learned it.
2. Bottled a smoked porter into a growler to condition when I didn't have enough bottles for the batch. Growler being weak and yeast doing it's conditioning thing, I woke up and looked at my prized possesions in my cellar only to see brown sticky dried beer ALL OVER EVERYTHING! The bottom of the growler completely sheered, and the growler was buried behind a bunch of boxes. That mess sucked but at least the floor was unfinished concrete.
3. Could've been worse: didn't attach my SS braid to my mash tun until all the water and grains were in the tun... didn't need a hose clamp for that brew
4. Didn't get my hose clamp tightened completely on my wort chiller, and after a few minutes of cleaning whilst cooling I see and feel a mist coming from my kettle. Look closely and the wort chiller connection is spewing the mist into my beer also out of the kettle. Caught it in time, no damage to brew.

 

@JackHorzempa the pun wasn't originally intentional, but I noticed it prior to posting and decided to roll with it

 

I've had two pretty bad experiences.

1. Brewing an RIS with less than adequate filtration equipment in the mash tun. This was a disaster, missed our target gravity (1.128) by an insane amount (1.050, talk about efficiency!) and generally hard to sparge in the worst way. It was a nightmare. We tried to salvage the batch by adding vanilla and cocoa nibs, but there was still a huge infection and bottle bombs. Basura.

2. We brewed a Gose the batch afterwards and my brewpartner wanted to try a kettle sour method because he wanted to drink it in the summer. Well, that didn't go as planned, either. After 48 hours the kettle started smelling extra butyric and I knew that was bad already, but when we tried to boil the lacto away the smell lingered. We thought maybe bottling would change it... it did not. It tasted like cheese and sea salt. It was great. Scust.

Other than that, we've been pretty good! Going to rebrew the RIS next weekend.