These 6 Mistakes Will Ruin Your Beer
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- čas přidán 20. 12. 2023
- We’ve all made the occasional mistake on a brew day but we tell ourselves it’s fine, we'll still make beer. But some mistakes are so egregious they will completely ruin a batch. I’ve asked members of The Brü Club to share their tales of woe and what they learned from those busted batches. These are 6 mistakes that will ruin your beer.
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My very first batch of beer, I didn't realize the sugar in the recipe was supposed to be for the boil...I added 4x the amount of priming sugar to the bottles.
💣💣💣💣
😂😂😂😂😂👌
Not closing the spundingvalve when you coldcrash ending up sucking in 2L worth of StarSan into the finished beer. Yummy. And forgetting to open the valve when starting the fermentation ending up comming into the brewshed watching the valve sitting at 2.8 bar like a ticking bomb.
Did this recently, lost 2 beers 🤦🏻♂️
Floating dip tube mistake ✅
Too many firsts mistake ✅
Thankfully those are the only 2 but they both resulted in a completely destroyed/lost beer. However, at this point if I’m not happy with a beer I just dump it. Life’s too short to drink bad beer (or share it with others 😂) cheers Martin 🍻
I once was lifting the grains out of my kettle after the mash. And the handle sliped out of the grainbasked. So I got flooded with 75°C wort over my legs, my floor, on the table, there was some on the wall. A lot of cleaning after that. Luckily it was not boiling yet. Jeans stops a lot of heat too. Always wear long pants when brewing.
Oh, and the beer was good in the end, so only one big fail that brew! 😆
Another balls up i have done. I planned and started a speedy brew day, heated water whilst at work come home mashed in and patted self on back for speedyness then relised I didn't have grain basket in 😮.
Managed to get everything out and start again and ended up with a good beer but took a lot longer than planned and a fair bit of panic involved.
Will Lovell: Switch to colored ball lock post o-rings. Green for gas, blue/black for beer. It's so great to know which post it is out of the corner of your eye, or in the back of the dark kegerator. Cheers.
One keg I bought had white and black o-rings. Always thought it was a good idea but never bothered to search out colored ones.
That’s a good one. I put a little blue masking tape on the liquid side and white tape on the gas side, but colored o-rings sound easier to see in the dark!
I’ve written ’in’ and ’out’ by the connections on my kegs.
I've put my spunding value on the wrong post and lost half a batch overnight. Easy enough to do and now I have painted around the base of my gas post to avoid that mess in the future. 🍻
I don’t know how many folks out here have the brew day rule of “never crack a beer until the yeast is pitched and the wort is fully put to bed.”
1st. Made my first lager but didn't know what a blow off tube was. Look in the fridge to find very active yeast. Pulled the airlock off and beer explosion in my face, walls and ceiling.
2nd. Made a 1gallon molasses historical beer. Thought it was done fermenting but nope. Blew up in my kitchen with glass shrapnel everywhere.
I was making some hard ginger ale. I boiled the yeast nutrient in about a pint of water and poured that straight into my fermonster before I added anything else.
Never pour boiling water into a PET fermenter. It ended up hopelessly warped.
I've also dropped and broke a LOT of hydromemeters.
When I read the title, the first thing I said was grain usage. My first recipe, I wanted a sweet honey flavor in so I used a butt load of honey malt. The beer was absolutely disgusting. It's all part of the learning process though, and part of the fun.
I accidentally measured out 2kg of Caramalt instead of 200g. Didn’t realise until I took a pre boil gravity reading of 1.086. I watered it down but ended up with a Pale Ale that’s not quite right
By my own error, i have 1 rule i absolutely will abide by and that is... never ever walk away from an open valve
One of the more easy to fix mistakes but not so serious I made was with dryhopping and just how much hop pellets expand. At the time I had not dry hopped with more than 30 grams/1oz of hops per batch and this one required me to put in a ton of hops. Think like 200 grams. Silly me did not realize this and I stuffed it all into a single hop sock which can maybe fit 60g/2oz of hops when they EXPAND..
I had literal dry hop pellets still in the sock because it floated to the top and maybe 30% of it was making contact with the beer. My lovely investment went down the drain and lesson learned..
I've had a few of them. One of my most recent escapades was my first batch with a Stainless Steel fermenter. I started the boil and sanitized the fermenter with ~4 gallons of sanitizer that was circulated through a CIP Ball. Halfway through the boil, I turned off the pump and disconnected what I didn't need for filling. I started chilling and transferring the wort to the fermenter, while being glad to finish my first brew in over a year. I got just about to the end and it dawned on me that I might have forgotten a crucial step. I pop the lid on the fermenter just to be sure and low and behold, there are 4 gallons of sanitizer sitting right on top of my new wort that was starting to mix. A full 5 gallon batch and a day of work went right down the drain. It was a wonderful return to the hobby.
Fellow TBC Learned Bruer: I opened my keezer once and I have a tap handle box on top. Tall handle caught the wall. Poured about a gallon of big stout all over the top and nearly ruined the wood base of the tile top. On the wall, in the keezer, on the floor. Beer dribbledv down the back of the keezer for a week.
I recently mashed in, thinking that the temperature might be a little low, so I left the burner on low. After mixing thoroughly, the temp was good so I left it for about 30 minutes. When I returned it was at 180f. I continued and made a beer out of it and it was very drinkable, just not the beer planned.
Sharing mason jars and a garage fridge between washed yeast and homemade sauerkraut was one of my great ideas. It only took one sip to figure out how stupid I was. Only 6 more batches in the pipeline!
I put my fermentation carboy in the powder room and then went on a business trip. The yeast was so powerful that my airlock was popped off and my beer painted the ceiling. The wife was not happy. I'm glad I wasn't there.
Just made a batch of Weissbier breaking all the rules
18 month old milled Grain, 18 month old hops stored in the fridge, 18 month old yeast that had been kept in the Fridge. Overnight mash. Now I've got a banana flavoured sour and no idea if it was the overnight mash resulting in a kettle sour, lack of preservative from the old hops or contaminated yeast.
Here is a fun one on my new spike conical:
Had a 10gal batch fermenting the first time I used it. Went to pull a sample and the entire sample valve fell off the tank dumping a lot of beer before I stuck my thumb to block it. Had wife run and grab and sanitize everything and I was able to save about half the batch and ended up tasting perfectly fine.
Luckily it was a lager that was just aging so I don’t think any bacteria had a chance to grow, and any oxygen that did get in I was able to purgue with co2.
I now triple check all my fittings.
Been there done that, Will !
Happy holidays and merry Christmas 🎅 🎄
I don’t drink until clean up, which is definitely the worse part of a brew day 😂
Going from making mead to making beer 1 day I decided to be smart and chuck a few sultanas in a stout. It kicked off hard,so hard the airlock got blocked and cause the top of my fermenter to explode and spray the inside of my ferm. Chamber with 23L of wort. Lesson learnt. No sultanas
Malt usage got me. When I first started writing my recipes I used way too many Roasted malts ending up with some rough flavors. Also oxidation. I tried some weird experiments at first with inline filters without purging, or using the auto siphon with a bottling wand to bottle & it wrecked the more sensitive beers. Also pepper beers, adding way too many jalapeños. Although some folks actually really liked the spicy beers & wanted more, I personally hated them 😂
I learned to use clamps on every connection. Tube popped off from pump and sprayed hot water all over my balcony
If people liked this may I suggest the Basic Brewing Radio end of year disaster show. I have no connection to them, but it's always a fun end of the year show.
Nothing quite that bad. Siphoning from the chilled boil kettle into a bucket with the spigot open while i was distracted with cleaning. Also, re-using a whole yeast cake with a 1.086 imperial stout with no temp controll on the fermenter
I've done the spunding valve on the wrong post, luckily I caught it before it made a big mess. Worst was a cracked carboy leaking out on the garage floor but no beers that were so bad as to be undrinkable but bearly.
My first attempt at a partial mash beer was an oatmeal stout. I'm not sure if I did something wrong or of the kit was flawed but after three weeks I'm the bottle it smelled like an ashtray and tasted like licking one. Not knowing what to expect, I let it sit and after a month popped one open. In that time it had transformed into one of the best beers I have ever had. Who knows? The first mistake beer in the video may have been salvageable given time.
I once went to transfer from mash tun to boil kettle, not realizing that I the ball valve on my boil kettle was open. I started my sparge, and transfer to the kettle and walked away for a bit. Came back out to a garage floor full of stout.
ROFL I did the #1 as well on a pressure fermenter, attached the spunding valve to the wrong post. Next morning, there was maybe 1gal of happily-fermenting beer going strong, plus 5 gal pushed out onto the kitchen floor. Yeah, #1's got MY vote. ;)
Mixing the gas and liquid line in fermenter, check.
Too complicated malt build, check.
Wild yeast blowing the airlock away and messing the floor, check.
Suck back several liters of StarSan from the airlock, check.
Fermenting US-05 in 30 Celsius and ruining the flavor, check.
Oxidation from the bottling bucket, check.
Lots of things I have made and learned from...
I made my Founders Curmudgeon clone and found out after fermentation and it already being kegged that I forgot to add molasses to the end of the boil. The result was terrible so to fix it I boiled some dme added my molasses and added it to the keg and let it soak for a week. After trying one glass of liquid butter and the whole batch went down the drain. Its tough to get old.
One of the worst mistakes I've made was deciding it was a good idea to save water with a keg washer (Mark's Keg Washer). I washed 2 kegs with the same 1 gallon of pbw solution. I then rinsed both kegs with the same gallon of water, and then added star san to the same rinse water to sanitize the kegs. I then kegged a bitter and a sour cherry short mead in those kegs. Two very good tasting batches before kegging were instantly ruined with an intense chemical taste that destroyed the body and head. And it actually took a bit of time for me to figure out what I did wrong.
Homebrew store cocked up for me once. I had ordered 95% Pilsner + 5% Munich. They sent me the opposite and I didn’t realise. Made one malty-ass beer!! I drank the whole thing though
Glad I'm not the only one that mixed up the kegmenter dip tube. Half a batch went down between wooden floorboards in our old victorian house. Won't make that mistake again.
Connecting the spunding valve to the dip tube side of my pressure fermenter and checking my brew the next day to find a my garage flooded with about 7 litres of barely fermented ale…
Two weeks ago: I kegged a hard cider I’d been making, I’d then let it sit to condition a week or so… it must’ve still been fermenting a little bit just with minimal activity in the fermentation bucket, because when I went to hook the gas line up, it backflowed right into the line because it was already under pressure 🤦♂️
Side note: I’ve been brewing for about 8 years, but only kegging for 1 - as someone who’s worked in food/beverage a lot of their life, this should’ve occurred to me.. this is why doing things in a hurry isn’t the smartest idea 😂
I built a temperature controller back in 2011 using a JLD612 PID unit. It's very good and still works today, but it comes with no instructions and the manual was well above my understanding when I first found it (had to seek it out, and it was not readily available back then--I had a buddy who was an electrical engineer, and he helped me with the initial build).
I did some basic tests with my first beer in my chest freezer before using it, calibrated it, etc. Seemed to work great. I had the freezer connected to one outlet and rather a large strip of lizard tank heat tape connected to the other outlet so I could raise the temperature when needed.
I pre-chilled the freezer while brewing, put the carboy in, and set everything up on the controller for 48 F. I checked on it an hour or so later and it seemed like things were pretty good.
The next morning, I checked on it again. It was hot. Probably 80-90 F in there. I'd mixed up the outlets on the PID box I built between the Heater and Freezer.
It was not a good beer.
Those outlets got much clearer, color-coded labels after that mistake.
I used wine corks to "seal" in a beautiful funky sour beer and the day I opened it it didn't have any carbonation.
Rotten broccoli beer..
An extract Oktoberfest recipe made early in my brewing career. Must have gotten an e-coli infection. Upon opening a few bottles, the arome of boiled rotten cruciferous veggies filled the room. That's not the worst part. I decided to be lazy and wait to empty the 25 or so grolsch bottles i was storing in milk crates in my kitchen well, one 85°F night in Northern New Jersey, the nasties in the bottles decided they had enough. Upstairs I heard the strangest harmony of animalistic squeals and hisses. I ran down to observe many fail8ng rubber gaskets spraying contaminated beer in every direction. It was a mess. I got them outside, wrapped them one at a time in a towel, and flipped the top. Little rocket engines they were. I'm just glad the bottles didn't explode!
I accidentally added 30g of sugar per bottle for carbonation instead of 3.0g; I literally woke up in the middle of the night a week later realizing what I had done and emptied every bottle ASAP so they wouldn't explode. The bottles were gushing so much I had to clean the ceiling over the sink afterwards...
I once used PBW solution to sanitize my bottles and not rinse it because I thought it was star san. It was my 18th batch and the only batch I have had to dump was this raspberry sour ale. I had tasted the ale prior to bottling from final gravity sample and it tasted wonderful. After cleaning my bottling bucket with PBW and rinsing it with water, I made a second bucket of star san to sanitize it. When sanitizing my bottles I thought I was using star san but nope, it was PBW. I was even wondering how is the solution so slipper and it doesn't foam like star san does. After finishing filling and capping ALL of my bottles I started to clean my fermenter and realized my error. After all that work I had to uncap every individual bottle and pour it down the drain. Never have been so disappointed in my brewing journey. I bought the raspberries and there was like 4 kg of them so it sting a lot also for how expensive batch it was.
My solution for future brews was to never clean the bottling bucket with PBW before bottling. Star san is sufficient to clean it prior to bottling. I do the PBW cleaning after bottling is done before I store the bucket in my closet again for storage.
Once I forgot to connect a spunding valve to kegmenter brew. Yeast cell must have imploded at 50psi, because that’s how much pressure was in it
I brewed a smoked beer, well before I knew about percentages and variances in malt versions. Was like drinking ash tray water but after a year, outstanding as it mellowed. I didn’t chuck it because I had the bottles spare.
I managed to catch the handle of my Fermzilla's dump valve on the corner of its wire stand whilst transporting it from the kettle to my garage for fermenting.
When it had 23 litres of tripel wort in it.
It's amazing how fast six gallons will drain through a two inch hole.
Danny, I feel your pain! My last brew was my first lager attempt, and I had the same issue. It's drinkable, but NOT enjoyable.
Note to self: If I start pressure fermenting, get a different color O ring for the gas post in the same color as the spunding valve attachment.
Forgot to adjust the pH on the mash brewing a Kölsch-style, and the water at that time here in Uppsala was close to the type in Dublin, so good for darket beers but paler… not so much. Wasn’t all that pleasant to drink.
As soon as I saw you talking about a 95% Cherrywood grist I knew this was going to be a wild ride
The smoke beer sounds like Stjørdalsbeer from Norway. It's an actual style using heavily smoked malt. It smells like an old fisherman who has smoked a pipe for the last 50 years, and it tastes like a bonfire.
I’m with you. I had my Kentucky Common blow out my fermenter. You can see the disaster @IMakeBeer.
Oh my goodness, I did the exact same thing with the cherry malt
Ive hooked my blow off/ spunding valve to the dip tube twice and lost both batches over the garage floor. Given the gas post is red and the dip tube post is yellow you would figure its a hard mistake to make. Note to self ; dont drink too much whilst brewing.
First ever all grain batch and didn't have an immersion chiller just yet. After cooling in the kettle for a couple hours, put the beer in the carboy and decided that it would cool faster if we put the beer in a tote of cold water. Glass carboy broke and first all grain batch never even made it past being wort.
Recent brew - used a Pilsner yeast I hadn't used before and was a liquid one to boot. Was in a light lager recipe I had done before and had really good results. Being a liquid yeast recommended by the brew shop, I asked if a starter should be used since it was in quite a large packet. "Nah mate, just tip it in".
Big mistake. Took four days for fermentation to start and never really developed any real pace. Finished beer had a really unpleasant taste to it; tasted a lot like a bad wheat beer rather than a nice clean, crisp lager. I'm guessing the lager was stressed out and developed a heap of esters as a result. Shared a few drinks with my friends and family, no-one liked it. Tipped the keg out. I'll stick with my tried and tested W34-70 for that beer from now on.
To my surprise, there are at least of couple of those mistakes I havnt made .... yet.
My messiest mistakes were not using a blowoff tube for a Belgian Tripel (kaboom, beer on the ceiling), and turning my mash pump back on while the end of the hose wasn’t hooked up to the return pipe (hot wort flying everywhere, could have burned me).
First time using my SS. Fermenter that I pick up used for 1/3 cost. I had the blow off tube running into a one gallon car boy with Star San. Came down two days later to find no Star San left. I had put the car boy on a self about 6 inches higher than the fermentation vessel. Come to find out it will create a back suction. Dumped five gallons of brown ale that day. Don’t feel bad for me. Feel bad for my wife having to deal with a grumpy husband.
Once my temperature sensor fell down on the (cold) floor.
So the heating beld heated it way to much.
The end result was a sour stout beer.
How did Brewer #2 do all those dodgy firsts and still enter the result into a competition?????? I'd have thought you'd taste your own result before nominating yourself! :o
I have flawlessly executed terrible beer many a time!😂
I just brewed my first two batches back to back, in a pressurized fermenter. Transfered them with c02 into a sterilized purged coney keg. Then carbonated them both with c02. This was my first time doing it this way. They both turned out slightly brown and flavorless. Turns out I didn't buy food grade c02. I was told that it's 99.9% c02 but from what I have found that's not good enough. I then brewed a third batch the same way but carbonated it with sugar instead. That batch turned out great! Now I have a bunch of c02 I cannot use.
I made two beers on Sunday, and was flying out at 5am on Monday.
So I asked my teenager to make me a small video of the two fermenters, fermzilla and allrouder, was fermenting under pressure.
He sent me the video andi saw happy years turning my wort into a a bavarian lager.
I came home 5 days later and found out that I didn't put the nut on the lid 😂
And after I looked at the video second time I saw that lid was already on the bottom of chamber when video was recorded and I didn't realize that 😂
Beer came out "not to style" to say the least
Once I mashed in on my single vessel... without the basket! 30%+ of flaked oats, couldn't even use the pump to help 😅
To avoid confusing gas and liquid keg posts I now use color coded o-rings. Grey for gas, black for beer. Makes it a lot easier, no need to look at little notches.
With some friends I did encounter mistake #2. I have never used brew buckets with spigots since. We also had no idea where the beer went 😂
I'm going to look for Bright Pink ones!
Rauch malt at 20% - liquid bonfire!
Storing a yeast longer than you should before pitching it, can cause autolysis... there by making you beer taste like vegimite.
Proper yeast managment!
I tried kettle souring and it didn't go well.
First time, I didn't acidify my wort and came the following day to a smell of vomit and goat in my kitchen. That was a dumper.
Next attempt, I did acidify the wort however, I did it when it was boiling hot. pH 4.6 at 100C is not pH 4.6 at 35C. I came back to that goat and vomit smell. I dumped it.
Now I use philly sour, quite good yeast.
Vomit and goat...man, I'm stealing that one. Cheers!
I did a kettle sour and it went ok. Didn’t acidify the wort though. After the mash I brought it to a boil and cooled it off. Then I used a pouch of Lacto and kept it at 90°F. Were you trying to do a mash sour?
@@JoeGraves24 no I wasn’t! Did a 30 min boil before, chilled and everything was sanitised
Here is one:
I had made a x-mas beer a few weeks ago, and it was sitting in a keg in my basement. This is in Norway, so its pretty chilly down there. Borderline fridge-temps.
In 2 days we were gonna have a x-mas party at work ("Julebord"), and i thought ... Let me taste this ... tastes good, just needs more carb, and i dont have alot of time.
How did i taste it? From a picnic tap.
How do you 'quick carb' beer? Put on 3 bar, and leave overnight.
Does a picnic tap support 3bar? Nope, i didnt know that either :D
The next day when i was gonna fill a few flip-top bottles to bring to the party, my basement was smelling kinda delicious, there were a brown-ish trail in the concrete from the keg to the drain in the floor, and the keg were bone dry.
Miscalculated the amount of lactic acid for ph-adjustment... after 4 bottles I called it quits and dumped the rest of the batch
I had a bottle full of starsan mixture in it used as an airlock connected to a stainless fermenter through a hose. After fermentation, when bottling, I felt something off. I didn't remove a hose from starsan mixture in the glass bottle. Cause of the pressure, 1liter starsan mixture got into a 5gal beer.. BTW, I DIDN'T DIE AFTER HAVING IT 😂😂😂 TASTE A-OKAY LOL ....so dumb 😢😢
My biggest shockingly stupid mistake was making a 2L starter that got badly infected and upon smelling this foul attrocity shrugging it off as a new yeast im not familiar with pitching it anyway.
Did you ever go on to brew a decent rauchbier? Or have you since tasted a good example? My wife still swears the only beer she likes (as a non-beer drinker) is rauchbier which we had in abundance in Bamburg
Using more than 20% caramel 80 with an English yeast fermented too hot. Tasted like rotten fruit covered in cloying sweet caramel, there was no saving it lol
If you are presure fermenting in a keg, is cold crashing as simple as just removing the spunding valve and putting the keg in you fridge?
Yes
Ah yes, I remember the rauchbeir incident. The look on your all’s faces told the tale of the toll. I oxidized a neipa that was undrinkable.
Don't sparge until you've gotten all the wort out the first time round when using a malt bag. That's how I killed my arm
When I was starting out I used twice the amount of hops in a Punk IPA clone which turned it into a bitter mess. Over £50 worth of hops down the drain...
you probably/possibly could have made a batch without hops, and more or less "watered" it out (beered it out?)
adding way to much coriander seeds in my belgian blond beer...i think it was like 2 or 3 grams / L it tasted awfull
5 grams of Irish moss at 15 minutes not 15 grams at 5 minutes. Throwing shit loads of coco powder at a stout will not make it taste of chocolate. My sour dough bread yeast does not make a good beer. Cheers everyone! 🍻🍻
What's the problem with moss one?
@@BasementArthurSpooner I put in 15 grams at 5 mins - it was not nice....
Plantation rum strong amber ale, very expensive ingredients, Rum was whisky and Cognac aged and soaked in white oak chips. Yeast was top tier.
Brewday, GF30 Mash tun temp probe came loose without me noticing, mashed at 80+. Had no idea why until after cleaning the kits post brewday, tried to save with sugar to get the innevitable cursed brew some extract.
Totally fucked, Probably cost me £60.
P.S I'm a professional brewer. FML.
Somehow, this feels very FAMILIAR....just sayin'