I have done a lot of stupid things in my 34 years of homebrewing, and I believe I had exhausted all of the dumb things I could do. But this weekend…a new one!
On April 7, I brewed 10 gallons of Belgian Golden/Tripel. Split them in two fermenters with WY1388 in one, WY3787 in the other. Kegged them a couple of weeks later and put them in the keezer, which is set at 35-38°. Tapped the WY3787 in mid May. Delicious, one of my better efforts. I ended up pulling a 2.5 gallon keg of it and took it to a conference I was attending - it was well-received by all who had a glass.
Last week after a month of drinking it the last of it finally blew. Oh well, I have the WY1388 keg untapped and cold conditioning for nearly 2 months. I am set.
We are finally remodeling the basement and Friday the electrician came over to install light fixtures. He got here at 8:00 am, and was still working at 5:30 pm. He’s a good guy and a friend who loves my beer, so I decide to tap the WY1388 and fill him a growler to take home.
I check the keg pressure with a gauge - 14 psi. Perfect for a strong Belgian golden. I draw a glass to capture the yeasty first pint - and this brown crud comes out in my glass! WTF? I taste it - its not beer. Its water.
I go and check the other kegs sitting on my basement floor, and find a full, unlabeled one. I open the lid and thieve a turkey baster of liquid - yep, flat Belgian golden ale. I had mixed my kegs up and stuck a keg I was soaking in water to clean the yeast cake out in the keezer, and left the true keg of beer sitting on the basement floor.
I’ve never done that - because I don’t keg. If I kegged, I certainly would have done it. Twice. (I won’t describe the mistake I made with a case of bottled beer.)
The funniest bottling story I have heard was a guy who used to post a lot here maybe 10 years ago who boiled hot dogs for lunch and ended up adding the hot dog water to the bottling bucket instead of the priming solution.
My biggest screw up remains one of my earliest. In my first all grain I forgot to switch the scale to grams and ended up adding ounces of brewing salts to a five gallon batch of brown ale. It turned out super salty and pretty gross. I found a few bottles years later and it tasted like the liquid in black olive cans.
I seem to be on a streak. Yesterday I brewed 10 gallons of Czech dark lager. In the process of lifting two bighead bubbler fermenters out of my temperature-controlled chest freezer, transferring their contents of Czech pilsner to kegs, filling them up with the dark lager wort, and placing them back into the chest freezer, I managed to knock the temperature probe for the controller out of the freezer and onto the basement floor.
So, today when I checked them 24 hours later, I discovered that the freezer was once again acting like a freezer, and I have two big mouth bubblers containing 5 gallons each of frozen wort and slurry.
Not optimistic that the yeast will be alive when the wort thaws. I am going to try to obtain a growler of slurry of lager yeast from one of the three local breweries that brew lagers here in town for insurance tomorrow. I know all three head brewers, its just a matter of if any of them has some lager yeast slurry available.
I froze a keg of beer once. Took my kegerator to a site where the brew club was serving the following day, so 4 of us could serve beer (it holds 4). Wanted it there in advance so we could just set up the other guys with all the hardware in place the next day. Mine, already in there.
Not sure who, but someone knocked the thermocouple out of the unit and the next day my beer was solid as a rock. I was not a happy camper…
my nightmare is somehow spilling an entire 5 gallons of either wort or beer on say the kitchen floor or any indoor floor. can you imagine the reaction of say a SWMBO to that?
That’s why you stay calm and quiet when they back through the garage door. Buy another door and consider it sufficient ammo for later. Like a “get out of jail free” card.
It is taking a loooong time for these blocks of ice to thaw. I forgot I had to go to a funeral service this afternoon, so I didn’t collect any slurry. I did go through my yeasts stored in the keezer and found one lone packet of Diamond lager.
I lifted the Big Mouths out of the freezer and placed them on a table to speed up the thaw. One of them has some wort leaked, but I could find know cracks, which makes me think it came from the gasket seal of the spigot. I tightened it up, stopped the leaks thus far.
Cautiously optimistic that the yeast slurry may have survived - one of the bubblers’ yeast lock is bubbling away. Or is that just a result of thawing? Time will tell.
I’ve totally done this also! (and now am even more fastidious about checking the position of the temperature probe). Last time, enough of the yeast survived to keep things moving along for the fermentation.
Yes, the yeast did survive so I didn’t have to pitch anymore yeast. Fermenting merrily away at 48-52°F (the range I set my temperature controller for lager fermentation).
My worst (or at least most dangerous). Had some homebrew stored in the garage and realized something was leaking. Emptied the case (including one shattered bottle) and started cleaning the bottles off. Went inside the house for something, came out and found this:
I made a costly mistake during my brewing attempt. After adding the yeast, I realized I’d mistakenly connected the floating dip tube to the gas outlet. This caused the fermentation to overflow, spilling four gallons of my five-gallon batch onto my carpeted living room. Thankfully, my wife’s support helped me keep my cool and continue brewing
Whole new market all to yourself!