I posted this topic on a different D-board years ago and it proved to be very funny. Lots of members had some really great stories of how they totally f'd up while brewing.

Please share won't you?

This was my most recent.

I was brewing at night (long story). It was really cold and windy that night and my garage was full of car so I couldn't boil in there. I found a semi-calm spot, but the lighting was not good. All was going marginally well until I got the kettle inside to hook up my chiller. That's when I noticed my big plastic spoon was missing. It wasn't until I removed my immersion chiller that I found it, bent like a noodle and partially melted to the bottom of the kettle. It got smashed by the chiller when I tossed it into the kettle the last 15 minutes of the boil.

I'm calling the brew Burned Spoon Pale Ale. I hope it doesn't taste like melted plastic.

did it actually turn out to taste good or like melted plastic

bigl21601 wrote:did it actually turn out to taste good or like melted plastic

Hard to say. I had a pretty good cold going on last week when I kegged it.

that sucks, I don't really have any blunders as yet. I just keep breaking my hydrometer; damn things are so fragile

I slathered my arm in OneStep on one of my first brews and fished around in the wort looking for a piece of something I thought I saw fall into the brew pot. I never found anything. I pitched the yeast completed the process through bottling.


Two to three weeks after bottling, I swore the beer tasted infected. All the books said it had to be. I poured the beer and chalked it all up to experience.

A couple of months later, I ran across a few bottles I had missed. What the heck, so I cracked one and tasted it. You can see where this is going.

The beer tasted fine! It was clean and clear, with no sour aftertaste. Lesson learned: I will always give funky tasting beer a minimum of two months to mature from now on.

I posted this on the "Random Chit-Chat" forum a few months ago, but it fits right in!

"Tonight I had to throw out a batch of beer...wort actually. I was cooling the brewpot half-full of wort in the bathtub ( I do this when I'm not in a hurry). Well, I left the water running and wandered off. When I realized my mistake, I came running in to see the pot floating sideways (with the lid still on, strangely enough), now full of wort and bath water. This was my first decoction, too."

I should note, that the next weekend I brewed the same recipe with GREAT success. One of my all-time best, actually!

My first batch I made I used a pot that was way too small and was scraping burnt wort and hops off the stove for a couple weeks. Recently I was moving a beer from primary to secondary and realized I didn't have an empty carboy, so I sanitized my brew pot and siphoned it into there while I sanitized my carboy. It was only after the beer spoiled that I realized I'd forgotten to sanitize the pots lid which had sat on the floor since I purchased the pot....... Only other one I can think of is substituting hops on a cream ale without checking the alpha acid %. It tasted fine after I gave it a month to mellow, and even then was still a little hoppy.

A friend of my was brewing with me. He mistook my pot of bleach water for top off water and "helped" me by pouring it into my partially filled carboy.

Well, not wanting to pitch the wort we poured it back into the brew kettle and heated it to boiling. You coud smell the chlorine being driven off. We than cooled the wort and pitch the yeast.

The yeast took off so everything seemed to be okay.

The beer ended up tasting fine will no noticeable off flavors. However, after a while I realized that everytime we had a bottle of Frankenbrew we ended up with a headache about an hour or two later.

Who knows what nastiness still lingered in that beer.

With much saddness I pitched that batch.

Oh well...you can't say we didn't try to save that batch.

- Scott

This just happened!

I am being overly productive and cooking up two AG batches today. I got up early and started my mash. A little later my wife walked through the kitchen and exclaimed "There's water all over the floor!" If only it were water.

When she first walked by my brewing operation her pjs caught the shutoff valve on my mash tun (cooler) sitting on the floor and opened it wide. Luckily I had just started the mash and only lost about 1 qt of liquor.

Well, I brewed today and had new brew day blunder for the books.

I set myself on FIRE!

I wasn't really paying attention and was just standing there on my deck stirring the kettle and enjoying the sunshine.

For some reason I looked down and discovered my flannel shirt was on fire. At any rat, I ripped the shirt off as fast as I could.

I got a blister on my finger and some singed hair but that's it. I got off VERY lucky!

I was picking things up and moving stuff around so I guess my shirt became untucked. After the fact I realized that the breeze was blowing the burner's flames in the direction I had been standing. Apparently my shirt flapped into the flames and presto! instant human torch.

That was a bit scary.

I guess the flaming thing was kind of appropriate since I was going to name this beer Redoubt Red after Redoubt Volcano that has been keeping us busy at AVO.



- Scott