Your worst brew day

Norwaystout

Norwaystout

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My worst brew day came this past weekend. I bought the wrong amount of crushed grains at my LHBS. Then while brewing the beer I put my wort chiller in to sanitize. Turned my back for one minute and the hop bag had moved the chiller just enough to move the clear tubing by my stove top burner. Both tubes melted. I really hope this beer turns out well, and I consider myself lucky if this is my worst brew day ever. What was your nightmare brew day?
 
worst brew day: was brewing in a bag with a 10 gallon batch, bag was used for a year and getting thin, the bag ripped while hosting it up with a winch, didn't have gloves on pushing grain in and holding it out of the wort with my bare hands, this is the time you wish you had a helper but I didn't so burnt sticky hands later I managed to get a bucket underneath, spilled barley sugar all over the floor, was a complete mess not a happy camper :D
 
There are two types of home brewer. Those who have mopped their ceiling, and those who have that to look forward to. I guess my worst brew day is yet to come. Ive made messes, broke $hit, made mad dashes to the LHBS, but I know it can get a lot worse, so I am humble and wary of the catastrophe to come. Whatever the hassles, if the beer turns out good then, right on. Could be worse. Could be calling 911.
 
Nothing catastrophic as yet, just the joys of cleaning up the stove after boiling over. Nothing like scrubbing burnt wort/trub from every nook and cranny.
 
Not sure if it was my worst brew day as a whole per-se, but spilling boiling wort onto my socked foot (i.e. no shoes...) was definitely not fun. The beers I had already consumed up until that point while brewing served to reduce the immediate pain somewhat, but the blistered toes did cause some discomfort a few days following. :|
What sucked even worse was cleaning up the sticky hop-powder-infused mess all over the kitchen (including inside :!: the oven).
 
Breaking equipment seems to be my bad brewing day forte. Usually when that happens its late in the day so I am in no condition to drive to the LHBS. Never had the spilled hot wort other than a few times a splash or so has hit my hand. I did recently burn my hand on the water that first came out of my wort chiller though. That was painful.
 
speaking of burn hands, a lesson learned I guess, don't ever boil water with the lid on then suddenly reach over and open the lid with your arm over the pot, scorched my arm, didn't heal for 3 weeks
 
Bought a new 36qt pot andwas using it for the first time ... after the mash, I realized it only held 32qt ... That made me pretty upset ... So I pulled out the extra gallon and started boiling ... break went all the floor, along with most of the hops i had just dropped in ... Grrrrr! 30 minutes into the "boil", I smelled gas ... Looked at the pot and it wasn't boiling any more! the boil over had run down the side of the pot, doused the flame, and clogged up half the holers on my burner ... Got real upset and dumped the batch in my back yard (my soul is still a littel black for that one) and as a constant reminder of my stupidity, i now have a big 4x4 foot patch of dead grass where i dumped it!
 
Recently i brewed a batch of IPA which tasted good but now it is over carbonated and taste like soda. I think too much priming sugar and hasn't hit terminal gravity
 
you can de-carb a bottle by just leaving it open for a while, not the greatest way but works
 
After having a run of seriously overcarbed bottles, I found the best way was to pour the bottle into a pitcher (>1l. for a 500ml bottle) and wait a bit for the foam to go down. :roll:
 
I am usually an outdoor brewer, but with bad weather this weekend and a deadline (visitors coming in a few weeks) I decided to do the brew in the garden shed.
The logistics seemed pretty good, but always in the back of the mind I had (irrational) a picture of either myself being asphyxiated, or the shed setting on fire.

So heated up the strike water, perfect temperature. Added the grain in parts, stirring as I go (I do BIAB). All going well, then I noticed the glow from under the pot.
So pre-occupied with bad thoughts, that I forgot to turn off the burner when I got to strike temperature :cry:

Quickly turned the burner off, stirred like a mad man and checked the temp again. Was aiming for a 153 deg. mash but ended up with 160. Left it without insulation for half an hour and it dropped to 154, but everything you read says with modern malts the conversion is pretty well done after 10 min. Insulated and left for a 90 min mash.

Luckily it was a fairly high gravity (1060) so the ABV should still be acceptable, but will probably end up with a sweet beer. But it will still be beer!

I have made this recipe before, so it will be an interesting (even if accidental!) experiment in higher temp mashing.
 
nzbrew said:
I am usually an outdoor brewer, but with bad weather this weekend and a deadline (visitors coming in a few weeks) I decided to do the brew in the garden shed.
The logistics seemed pretty good, but always in the back of the mind I had (irrational) a picture of either myself being asphyxiated, or the shed setting on fire.

So heated up the strike water, perfect temperature. Added the grain in parts, stirring as I go (I do BIAB). All going well, then I noticed the glow from under the pot.
So pre-occupied with bad thoughts, that I forgot to turn off the burner when I got to strike temperature :cry:

Quickly turned the burner off, stirred like a mad man and checked the temp again. Was aiming for a 153 deg. mash but ended up with 160. Left it without insulation for half an hour and it dropped to 154, but everything you read says with modern malts the conversion is pretty well done after 10 min. Insulated and left for a 90 min mash.

Luckily it was a fairly high gravity (1060) so the ABV should still be acceptable, but will probably end up with a sweet beer. But it will still be beer!

I have made this recipe before, so it will be an interesting (even if accidental!) experiment in higher temp mashing.
Click to expand...
And today it just gets better!

I have a fridge converted to a fermentation chamber. It has a freezer above it. For the last 3 weeks I've had the temp on 68 degrees, conditioning.
At that temp the compressor rarely kicks in so I stored some bottles in there to free up some floorspace.
Yesterday (brewday) down it went to 59 degrees. Now the cooling comes into action.

Woke up to the fact just now - 24hrs later - tgat the freezer part might be cooling down a bit much.

Half of the bottles have frozen, luckily lids all intact so hopefully I can recover from this one!

Just filled a growler from the keg tap, time to relax.
 
I have a good one. This was a couple weeks ago already, but it was definitely my worst brew day.

It started with me not having enough strike water for the ratio I wanted. Then I ended up about 2 degrees higher than I'd like. Then I had a stuck sparge (wheat beer). After all that, about 20 minutes into my boil a thunderstorm came and I decided to keep it going as long as possible. I'm under a patio roof, but the rain started to get sideways and the lightning was getting closer and when the wind get so big I was getting really wet I killed the propane, covered the pot and went inside. That's when the tornado sirens went off (no tornado but a severe thunderstorm). It sat like that for 30 minutes (the timer was still going), and when I went back I did 15 more minutes of boil to kill anything that might have gotten in there and said screw it.

I was 20 points short, but I haven't tasted it yet. I used my oxygen system for the first time and got my yeast starter going again so it had a very healthy fermentation.

I guess I'll see how it goes in a few weeks.
 
I like to stock up a little bit on ingredients, and every once in a while I'll just brew a batch with whatever I need to use up, like some random yeast packet, or steeping grains I forgot I had. In my newbie days, about 10 years ago, I started a 3-gallon batch and realized I only had a pound of malt extract. Not realizing that there were certain non-fermentable sugars, I started digging through the pantry and found a bottle of molasses. :? "Hmm, this will be interesting, and l like darker beers; let's see what happens!", I thought to myself. So, going ahead with everything, I had a normal-looking fermentation but I never bothered tasting it prior to bottling and totally ignored my gravity readings as well. Two weeks after bottling, I poured a glass of semi-carbonated, sickeningly sweet stuff (It doesn't deserve the title of "beer") which I couldn't give away. So, brew day in itself went okay but the consequences made it a day best forgotten until now.
 
cold day the night before, had a hard time with my Mash temps (even inside), boiled and went to cool the wart with a chiller, hose broke (too cold), ran to the front to move the hose to the back, finally got it cooled down( after I got the ice out). Drained it to the fermenter, hose came out made a little mess on the floor, bumbed , almost forgot to airdate my wort and cam close to forgetting the yeast.
shouldn't have had a long night the night before.
 
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