My buddy and I had our first, and soon to be hilarious brewing story.
It was bound to happen:
We brewed a Honey Wheat beer, the other day.
LME kit, added 4 lbs. of honey with yeast energizer, Irish Moss.
He went down to check on the beer; the next morning, only to find the airlock on the other side of the room.
The rubber stopper right beside it, a soaked towel covering the carboy and a puddle of beer on the floor.
We had a MASSIVE blowback, the pressure from the CO2 blew off the air lock and rubber stopper and shot beer up to the ceiling!
I’m giggling about this now, but anyone have any funny stories like this?
I’d love to hear them.
My funny story is about wort moving in the opposite direction from yours–down. Two years ago, I forgot to close the valve on my kettle, and so as I was draining the mash tun, it was then draining onto the kitchen floor while I was pre-occupied doing other things… until I saw the huge puddle. It dripped under the flooring, through the floor boards, and right into the basement–coming down on my little beer fridge, so some justice there. The funniest part is I haven’t told my wife…and never will, or I’d never brew again in the kitchen.
I don’t know if mine is funny as much as it is kinda scary, but it fits the theme. I noticed at one point that my storage boxes were brown and looked like they had been wet and then dried. Started looking around for a leaking bottle and never found anything. Over the course of a few months found a few small pieces of broken glass and realized a bottle had exploded. Never found any really big chunks of it. About a year later, completely emptied the closet to rearrange all of my brewing stuff and finally found the whole top of the bottle. The complete neck with cap still on.
Thankfully, in 5 years of homebrewing and who knows how many bottle conditioned bottles, this one is the only one that’s ever exploded on me. knock on wood
It was a dark and stormy night. Early in my brewing career; repitching an entire yeast cake was a fantastic idea. With vim an vigor, and too little headspace in the fermenting bucket I proceeded. My ripe wisdom decided the 50 degree basement was far too cool. I moved said bucket in to the linen closet, and settled in to a well earned slumber. Upon waking I was greeted with an aroma of hops, flowers and all things dank. My curiosity grew and I opened the closet. I found a displaced bucket lid and airlock that nearly broke the gravitational forces of mother earth. Space-bound brewing gear, a smattering of hops krausen danced upon the walls and linen. That day, I knew I was indeed a homebrewer.
Back before I had kegging i had brewed a really nice Quad. Decided to bottle it one night after work. I was hungry so I fixed a quick snack while I was getting stuff ready and had two small identical sauce pans on the stove. One had my priming sugar/syrup in it. Long story short, I got all done and was cleaning up when I discovered I had primed about 48 bottles of delicious Quad with leftover water from heating hot dogs.
I built a kegerator and bought some kegs after that.
Last summer I judged a beer comp in MA and in the second flight I was assigned to what I refer to as the “weird beers”.
Anyway, one of the beer was a “hot dog” beer.
The beer was there and all of the flavors of a grilled hot dog were also present.
The brewer did an amazing job.
That said, I wouldn’t want to drink a pint of it.
I think there’s a mad libs version of this, it goes something like this:
Last time period I verb a beer at a/n event.
I poured myself a glass, and it was adjective! I could really taste the flavor, there was even the smell of flavor.
The brewer did an adjective job.
I’m glad I tried it, but I wouldn’t want to drink a pint of it.
The great Michael Jackson, when he was his newspaper columns, had some reviews on this model. He could go on for paragraphs of florid prose, describing in great detail the rare and sublime qualities of a beer, and conclude with something like “but of course it’s completely undrinkable.”