How Bad Have You Crashed and Burned?

On Father’s Day my wife and I were wandering around town in the nice Spring weather, and wound up for a time in our local kitchen gadget store. They sell beer kits in there, and I overheard a woman telling the shop owner that since she and her husband moved to town, he’s made two batches of beer that were so bad they had to pour them down the sink. To make a short story long, I jumped in to say that I’ve been brewing with our local tap water since moving to town almost 11 years ago, and I’ve never had a problem. Ditto for several friends of mine who are homebrewers in the area. Told her to have her husband get in touch with me and we’d see if we could figure out the problem.

This prompted me to think, though, that in the 18 or so years that I’ve been brewing, I’ve never made a batch I didn’t drink. Sure I’ve made some that I didn’t absolutely love. Some that was too watery or otherwise didn’t have the best mouthfeel. Occasional batches that didn’t taste exactly like I expected. And obviously some recipes that I simply didn’t much care for.

The worst batch I can remember was in 2003. It had a noticeable (to me, at least) funky finish. It is by far the worst batch I ever made, but it was still drinkable. In fact, I had one friend at the time who told me it was one of his favorite of my brews that he’d tasted up to that point, so what I perceived as a fault may very well have been a matter of opinion.

To my knowledge, none of my homebrewing friends have ever had a real catastrophe, either. An explosive bottle here and there, of course, and like me, a few batches that didn’t make it onto the favorites list. But I don’t personally know of anyone who’s dumped a batch.

How 'bout y’all? What’s your worst batch?

Black Imperial IPA. Came out OK up to and including kegging, where I decided to do a final dry-hop charge. Used a nylon stocking, a few ounces of Citra whole-leaf, and some stainless ball-bearings to weigh the bag down so it wouldn’t just sit there on the top.

Ball-bearings worked fine - plenty of weight - just that they were 430 grade stainless as they were ball-bearings, and not the non-corrosive type such as 304 or 316. See where this is going?

Darn things rusted over the course of the several days in the keg carbonating and conditioning. By the time it came for the first sip, I knew it was drain food - plenty of iron, though, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not. Sad day. True story. Lesson learned.

I’ve 2 or 3 that were absolutely undrinkable over my 17 years.

It doesn’t happen often but it does happen.  Lately my beers have been just kind of “meh”, not bad but not great.  I need to focus more and check the details going forward.

You’re right though, as long you aren’t doing something really off the beaten path, it’s difficult to make a truly horrible beer.

Paul

Heh. I think I’d drink the ball bearings before I’d drink the perfume.

When I moved to KC, didn’t know there were chloramines in the water. Brewed a Wee Heavy and it was a chlorophenol BOMB.

Saved some of it for off flavor classes and dumped the rest.

I pinned a cotton hop bag to the bottom of my kettle with the IC for the last 15 minutes of the boil. the bag and about a quarter of the hops actually burned under the wort. Black and charred. the whole batch smelled like camp fire yuk. kept trying to convince myself it was just a happy accident and I had 5 gallons of smoked hefe but finally I gave up my illusions and dumped it.

I’d guess I’ve dumped 5 or 6 out of 458.

I’ve dumped two batches. Was brewing in an old house with LOTS of mold in the basement. I was opening up my lids too often to sample, and ended up with some awful beer. The incredibly hoppy alt turned out quite nice, even though it was clearly infected. Other two…bleh. Super gross.

I’ve dumped 2 batches that were oxidized pretty badly over the years. The only ones I’ve dumped, but I started out fermenting too warm (before I got a handle on the amount of heat produced from fermentation). So there were some overly fruity, estery, fusel-ly headache bombs. Everybody has a story !

Dumped 2.
#1 Was my Weiner Quad. A lovely Belgian Dark Strong that was primed for bottle conditioning with water that had boiled hotdogs rather than sugar.
#2 Was a Vienna Lager that got contaminated with pedio. (I think)

No way! That is awesome.

True story. Use obviously different pans if you are going to cook weenies while bottling

Best homebrew story ever. Hands down.

I’ve had 2 batches so far:

  1. A hard cider that had potassium metabisulfite (whose effects I was unaware of at the time) in it, so the yeast fermented the sugars I added, but not the cider itself. Adding more sugar and yeast to try to amp it up. Ended up with about 6% ABV ape cider vinegar…kept it for too long

  2. An ESB that was my first batch using water additions, which sucked. On top of that, I ended up with acetaldehyde bad from taking off the cake too soon or over pitching. Bottle half for a buddy and I dumped my keg and made him dump the bottles.

I’ll take it!

Discovered the mistake 3 weeks later when I went to check progress. Nasty, though I didnt try it with mustard.

Yes.  This^^^^^^ :o  Awesome… in a horrible, horrible way…

I dump batches I don’t like… no big deal.  The worst batch?  Hard to say for sure.  I am positive I had some horrible infected/chlorophenol bombs back when I started 17+ years ago… blocked those out at this point. My worst batch in the last 5 years was a spiced pumkin ale… held out hope on it for about 2 years before finally opening 40-50 bottles and dumping them down the drain.

I have dumped a lot of beer. Most of the times it was perfectly good beer that I was just making room for something else I was more excited for. But there are times I’ve either just not liked a beer via recipe flaws or experimental flaws that otherwise were perfectly fine but that I had no desire to drink. There have also been a few off infections and some fruit fly infection via hot, humid southern summers and pervasive fruit flies.

I own a commercial brewery now and am more anal than ever but I am proud to say I have not had to dump a batch is a long, long time. Now let me go find some wood to knock on. Nothing is worse than dumping $10k of beer down the drain over a stupid mistake. Let’s not ever talk about the exploding bottle recall. OMG that was a nightmare.

Wait, that is true ?  I thought it was BS all this time. Well I hope they were at least good all beef franks  :wink:
Yeah, greatest homebrew story ever !

I’ve dumped a few. Simple early homebrewing errors early on mixed with a few experiments gone wrong. The worst was my first attempt at water adjustment. I left the digital scale set to ounces and ended up with a beer that way entirely too minerally. It fermented out but it tasted way too salty to drink. I used most of the batch for cooking and dumped a few bottles. I found a couple bottles about a year ago. The bottles were probably two years old. Opened them up and it smelled and tasted like the liquid in cans of black olives. Needless to say, that is a mistake I have never made again.

I have a batch of sour beer that has been a problem in every sense. It is acetic as heck and the flavor isn’t great but I think I’m going to hold on to the batch and use it for blending.

The first rule of the exploding bottle recall is not to talk about the exploding bottle recall…