You know how it goes. Drop a carboy, burn the mash, put 3 eyes of newt instead of 1. What’s your disaster story? OK, we’ve all had those brewing days where nothing seems to go right. Not just running out of propane…you know, the kind of day where you wonder why you’re doing this! But we power through and keep brewing. For our April Fools show, we’re looking for stories of brew days gone wrong…really wrong. Something to make us all feel better about our own brewdays from Hell! Email your brewday disaster stories to podcast@experimentalbrew.com or call our Beer Hotline at 626.765.1ALE and tell us your story!
thanks to some guy on the internet hyping up batch sparging :), the first time I did it I forgot to close the valve on the keggle I was sparging into. After vorlauf I opened up the valve to my mash fun full blast and went inside and made toast, came out to all my precious wort on the ground.
I have a friend who’s “famous” for doing that repeatedly. He also once poured out a yeast starter on the ground because he thought it was sanitizer!
haha, its so easy to forget, one stupid little valve and all your hard work is gone.
On one of my first brews, I somehow failed to account that LME needed to be stirred into the water and not simply dumped in all at once. The ensuing burnt on crud that was left on the bottom on my pot could have survived a nuclear blast it was so cooked on. It was a cheap pot so I just ended up throwing it out.
Lets see, how else am I an idiot…
I used standard heating elements in an electric keggle I built and the ensuing wort smelled and tasted like kingsford charcoal.
boiling starter wort+yeast=dead yeast.
I’m sure I do… and I’m planning on 2 - 3 brews this weekend so I might have a few more stories by Monday! ;D
Man, it runs the gamut in terms of all my screwups!
1/ 2 broken carboys where I got stitches.
2/ Scorched DME and LME that didn’t get stirred, as posted above.
3/ Brewing a double batch and pitching the wrong strain into the wrong wort.
4/ Same as above, but wrong hops into wrong wort.
5/ Broken glass thermometer into my wort. Yeah, wow.
Many others. I learned how to be creative with the profanity.
There is always something going wrong on brewday right? One that comes to mind for me is I brewed a Lager for a friend towards the end of last year and I needed to add around 3 ml of Lactic acid to my mash. I use small plastic medicine syringes. I have one that is 1ml on a full draw. Well I recently added a new one to the stash and I grabbed the wrong one, its larger and is actually 5ml on a full draw…I filled that sucker 3 times. Measured the mash ph at something like 4.5 and realized what I did. I was about to give up on the batch but it was for a friend who really wanted the beer. I figured I would at least see how it turned out. Baking soda to the rescue. I skipped the acid in the sparge and ran with it. Believe it or not it turned out to be just fine. I was worried about the flavor threshold but I couldnt pick up anything even with 15ml of Lactic acid. It was a very crisp, clean Amber Lager. :o
I did the LME thing… I don’t think ive ever heard more requests for a repeat recipe than that one… I went with it since it didn’t scorch bad enough where it was all stuck down there, but I was convinced it was going to be terrible. It ended up delicious.
Garden hose for counter flow wort chiller unknowingly froze. Ended up with “hot” wort going into glass carboy on a minus zero day. Blew the top off the glass carboy…It literally exploded “feet into the air”. Quickly washed mouth out with grain alcohol and siphoned wort into another barely disinfected carboy @ 9:00ish a.m. Try doing that any time, let alone early morning - HELLO morning. Beer was pretty good. The LODO people would’ve had a screaming mimi watching me run it through a kitchen sieve 2 or 3 times just to ensure the glass was removed. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger ;D
A few summers ago, I was brewing an all-grain Summer Ale. My system is all gravity. My sparge water is in a cooler on a tall ladder. My mash tun is on another ladder and my collection bucket is on the ground. My boil kettle is on the burner near by. So, I was done running my sparge water. At this time, I collected about 3 gallons and I needed about 3 more gallons of wort. I asked my self why I wasn’t collecting my runnings directly into the kettle. I decided to move my mash tun in order to do that. I picked up my mash tun and then dropped it. (When it fell, time slowed down). I had grain and wort all over my garage floor. I decided to head to my LHBS and pick up some DME to make up the difference. When I got there, he was closed, so I left. Fortunately, the owner saw me and texted me. So he did sell me some DME and I finished with a descent beer.
I once bottled a 5 gallon batch of beer without adding any priming sugar.
So I had two empty kegs and was transferring Vienna lager to the kegs from bright tanks for an annual party. I CO2 purge with sanitizer, so one keg was filled with sanitizer and jumpered to a second keg to push it all out and then fill that empty sanitized keg from the bright tank keg. Then clean, sanitize and purge the prior bright tank keg and repeat the process with the second bright tank of Vienna…except somewhere along the line after removing the tape identifying the beer kegs, I confused which was which and proceeded to put about a half pint of iodophor solution into a bright tank of Vienna Lager! I could not tell the difference in the beers - so I guess it turns out that beer is pretty forgiving, indeed. I am also happy that my iodophor solution was at the dilute end of the spectrum for its use. I didn’t bring the bad keg to the party…if you were wondering about that.
I was brewing a 10gal batch. My brew day was moving along as normal. Then, while transferring the chilled wort into one of the two 6.5 gal glass carboys I decided I wanted the second carboy moved. So, I reached over the top of the carboy that was filling and grabbed the empty one. As I was over the top of the one getting filled it slipped out of my hand. Both carboys were smashed on the garage floor with 5gal of wort. Fortunately, I didn’t get cut. Plus I still had 5 gal of wort to transfer into another carboy.
One pleasant summer morning I was finishing a mash of my favorite Irish Red. I had a basic recirculation system going on the mash tun with a HLT warming up next to it; separate output hose on the HLT to quickly plug into the pump when I was ready to start sparging. Guess a slug found that hose while I wasn’t watching, because moments after I started the sparge water flowing he came spraying out all over the top of my mash. Eww.
I’ve never had a disaster, so I’m worried one is coming. The worst that happened to me was having a water heater blanket on my kettle for mashing. Mash done, so I start the flame and forgot to take the water heater blanket off first.
Pretty timely thread - here’s another major screwup. Lost one of the kegs of dunkel overnight because it leaked out the swivel nut on the liquid QD. Helluva mess. Luckily it wasn’t the low O2 one, since it’s going to NHC. I got burned years ago and lost a keg due to the same thing. I tightened all the connections and was fine for years. Obviously the safe thing is to disconnect the QDs at night. Nothing like a self inflicted wound. 
Once, after a double decoction, I started running off a sparge. Went inside to make coffee and got delayed longer than I expected. When I came back outside I noticed I left the valve open on the boil kettle and most of the wort has just trickled out on the deck. Boy was I mad.
I posted this on another forum:
Brewinhard replied here to give solace.
I did put on the blowoff tube but it turned out it wasn’t needed.
The beer turned out great.
Made a three-quart yeast starter for a lager. It was in a brown gallon jug. I also keep my Star-San in a brown gallon jug and reuse it. Used some Star-San and went to pour it back in the jug. When the jug overflowed before half the Star-San was in, I knew what I had done. Whoever says it doesn’t kill yeast is wrong. I decanted and pitched the yeast. That lager had a very poor ferment.
Like others, my biggest brewing disasters happen not on a brew day, but somewhere along the line. To wit:
A couple of years ago we had a small group (8-10) friends over for a summer barbecue. Everyone was sitting out on our deck. Underneath the deck and out is my brewing/ meat smoking area, with my brew room in the basement.
I went down to pull some meat out of the smoker, and took it inside to carve in my brewing room. I accidentally dropped my by heavy set of tongs during the process. Ordinarily no big deal, except they landed and karoomed off a 5 gallon glass carboy that currently was serving as a secondary fermentor for a 10% abv Russian Imperial Stout.
The tongs hit the edge of the carboy where the vertical sides start curving up to the neck. This broke a very small hole at the spot of impact, causing a small stream of RIS to squirt out of it. I though that if I lifted it onto the table and started a siphon into a keg or bucket, I could capture and save most of the RIS.
Unfortunately, the small hole marked the end of the structural stability of the carboy. When I attempted to pick it up, it failed, and RIS poured all over the basement floor. Fortunately, the carboy fell apart into large shards, which I easily picked up and placed into a trash can. I then quickly mopped up and hosed down the RIS mess (my basement floor has a floor drain, which greatly helps when such disasters occur), and I had every thing cleaned up and done in 10 minutes, before a guest could come downstairs to fill a beer out of my kegerator and see what I have done.
I carved the brisket, and headed up to the deck for dinner. No one knew of my disaster. I told my wife what had happened after the guests went home. 8)