For all the help y’all have given me over the past few months, I thought I would tell you about my friend’s brewing experience yesterday. Hopefully you’ll get a chuckle or two out of it. I probably will also in the (far) future. These are excerpts from my, errr, his brew log:
Well, what can I say? At this point this is looking like an experiment gone very, very awry. I wanted to try a “kit” beer so ordered this one from Northern Brewers. Good ratings and called Dead Ringer. After my day today, I toyed with re-naming this Comedy of Errors IPA because of all the problems I had, but that would describe so MANY of my beers. The problems follow:
1. It took a week for the shipment to get to me. So, the yeast was in about 100 deg F heat (or more) for a week. Pretty much should spell death for yeast and I worried a lot about that, but I decided to go through with it anyway. (and I usually worry about keeping the little things cool in my normal 90 minute drive from my brew store)
2. As I removed the grain from the shipping box, I spilled it all over the kitchen floor. My wife and I got “most” of it up – but left maybe ½ a pound (which landed in place we just didn’t want to go). Not to speak of how much crap from the floor got mixed in with the stuff I tossed back into the grain.
3. I made too much wort (didn’t have to, because the sugar stopped coming well before the 5 gallon mark). So, I ended up with nearly 6 gallons of beer – after the boil. I had to throw out a gallon – thereby ensuring a lesser OG reading (and alcohol and beer quality) than I should have ended up with if I had boiled it down or not started with as much as I did in the first place.
4. When I put the pot into the ice bath on the deck, it overflowed a bunch of ice cubes. Rather than throw the cubes back into the ice bath, I threw the first few handfuls into the wort. Along with bugs, twigs and whatall else they picked up from the deck floor.
5. As we were outside cooling the wort, it started raining – for the first time in a month!! Sigh. Shielded it the best we could while waiting for the chiller to do its thing.
6. As I pitched the yeast starter, the carboy was too full and at least half of the yeast ended up on the kitchen floor. No, I didn’t sponge it up and put it in the wort – as you might think I would do given the above.
As I watch the bubbles coming up from the wort 20 hours later, I notice how “muddy” it looks. Don’t suppose this would be because of all the – ummmm – adjunct material I added along the way?
LOL. Absolutely right.
I’ve had a number of batches where I thought I had really frucked something up on brew day (the mishaps are many and varied), and in the end the brews turned out great.
And wouldn’t you know it, always pretty much unrepeatable.
So, at least a couple of times a year I have a brew that’s labeled in my logbook as “Disastrous ‘Lil Darlin’ #___”
“6. As I pitched the yeast starter, the carboy was too full and at least half of the yeast ended up on the kitchen floor. No, I didn’t sponge it up and put it in the wort – as you might think I would do given the above.”
Actually I expected you to wet vac it, realize you hadn’t cleaned the dirt out from for about a good year, but still pitch it.
So true.
My best beer so far (out of three) has been one I threw together as a total shot in the dark of ingredients, boiled my hops a bit longer than I intended, had sloppy sanitization, squeezed the hell out of the grain bag after steeping (not realizing the possibility of tannin extraction at the time) and then I misread the yeast package and fermented it probably 10F warmer than I should have for the first three days.
I hear you though on beersasters. I once made a double IPA we ended up naming India Fail Ale because of the following:
-Set the stovetop on fire (boilover out of control + electric element)
-Burnt sinuses owing to concentrated hop oils (and gasses) in our fermenter when we went to check the smell
-Alarmed about our first hop oil slick at racking, we left to look it up only to return and find the siphon hose floated up and out of the bucket, spilling no less than 2 gallons of beer on the floor. The carpeted, university-owned floor that we weren’t supposed to be brewing on anyway.
-Newbie calculations in the beginning led to a beer that was 10.5%, which of course was not our goal.
All in all, we loved it more for the hi-jinx. Good luck with yours!
first pale ale i made, i went to siphon into the secondary via my mouth and a hose, once i got beer running through the hose i ended up sucking in too much and got some in my mouth. well im not one to waste and decided that spitting it back in the secondary seemed like a pretty good idea, well it turned out to be the best pale i’ve ever made
