story time - let's share horror stories

[jcbrewing]

Earlier this year, as I finished brewing, pitched the yeast. then carried the batch to the garage, the glass carboy slipped out of my grasp and I dropped a glass carboy on the garage steps and, well, 5+ gallons of beer on the garage floor and glass all over. After the 4 hour brew, and 2 hour clean up, I ordered a few plastic bottles. Luckily, no injury. Just had to get back on the brew horse.

[Chris_J]

the cat got soaked.

thats what SHE said!


(sorry i just had to... the voices told me to say it)

hehehe yeah it is.

sounds like a horrible excuse for 'why my woman has a black eye'.

reminds me of a horrible horrible [which makes it funny] joke: what do you tell a woman with two black eyes? . . . nothing you haven't already told her twice.

No luckily she didn't have a black eye lol. Your awesome joke reminded me of the Simpsons: "When a woman says nothing's wrong, that means everything's wrong. When she says everything's wrong, she means EVERYTHING'S wrong. And when she says something's not funny, you'd better not laugh your ass off"

[Chupa LaHomebrew]

This sounds like it's becoming a typical story...

I was coming home from work, still in my stinky work clothes from selling cheese. Went to check out the Dubbel fermenting in the closet. Yeast was coming up into of the airlock, and from only one teeny tiny hole on the airlock cap there was spraying a tiny stream of yeast. I was leaning over the carboy gently rocking the airlock out when BAM! Money-shot of yeast right in the face.

I went to the bathroom, took of my glasses. There was a negative-image of my glasses around my eyes where they had blocked the spray. On the ceiling of the closet, there was a negative image of my head and shoulders. Luckily, it was my clothes on that side of the closet, not my GF's expensive shit.

[bloberglawp]

My first allgrain resulted in my manifold falling apart from the bottom of my lauter tun igloo cooler, I ended up straining the wort thru a colander and got 45% effeciency. I added DME, boiled and so on. While cooling, the wort chiller hose fell apart and sprayed all over the cooling wort, so I reboiled for a bit, then chilled...

I think I might have underpitched... I was fooling around with making starters from dreg from bottles, I had a small slurry of what I thought was fuellers yeast. The result: I got my very first (and so far, only) extremely foul and infected batch.

I dumped it.

[HighCountry]

I brewed 12 gallons of a delicious Kolsch last summer, like I've done for years. Nailed all my numbers, as I've done for years. Wort tasted fantastic, as it has for years. I fermented in a temperature controlled chest freezer at 60 degrees, as I have for years. Temperature was constant and perfect, as it has been for years. Raised the temp to 68 for a diacetyl rest for a week, as I had done for years.

Let me back up a bit. I had attached blow off tubes to the carboys, as I have done for years. What was different, though, was that I had run out of StarSan and used a light bleach solution in the blowoff solution. Normally, I would never use bleach for anything that touches beer. But the beer was blowing off all over the place, so I had to do something.

Of course, by the time I was performing the diacetyl rest, I had forgotten that I used bleach for the blowoff solution. And I was out of the country for a month and called my wife to tell her how to drop the temp in the freezer to 33 degrees to lager the Kolsch. Normally I would have pulled the blowoff tubes and recapped long before this point in the process, but I had been really busy traveling for work. I was really looking forward to drinking some Kolsch when I got home.

Instead, I found a couple empty juice containers where the blowoff bleach solution had been. Does anyone know what happens when you cool a liquid in a closed system? The liquid contracts in volume, causing a vacuum, which sucks up bleach solution into the carboy.

I dumped 12 gallons of High Country Bleach Kolsch on the lawn, which killed the grass. I must have mixed that bleach solution a little stiffer than I thought.

[AndrewD]

I was making JZ's Milk Stout last week. Everything went great. Immersion chiller cooled the wort to pitchable temp in about 10 minutes, as it was almost freezing outside. I was getting ready to pitch when...

...I noticed the pound of lactose still on the counter!!! It only took another hour and a half to reboil the wort with the lactose and chill back to pitching temp. Now I have Double-Chilled Sweet Stout. Hopefully the fact that the cold break caramelized during the second boil won't fuck it up too bad.

[PseudoChef]

I was making JZ's Milk Stout last week. Everything went great. Immersion chiller cooled the wort to pitchable temp in about 10 minutes, as it was almost freezing outside. I was getting ready to pitch when...

...I noticed the pound of lactose still on the counter!!! It only took another hour and a half to reboil the wort with the lactose and chill back to pitching temp. Now I have Double-Chilled Sweet Stout. Hopefully the fact that the cold break caramelized during the second boil won't fuck it up too bad.

I really hate to be the one to say this, but you could have just boiled the lactose in a small amount of water, cooled that, and added it to the beer at a later point.

[BigNastyBrew]

In April of this year, my wife went out of town to see her family for the weekend. Friday night, I hit up Rock Bottom, BJ's, and Gordon Biersch. I was so fucking hammered. After a few hours of sleep, it was time to brew my 4th AG batch--Jamil's Sweet Stout. My head was pounding, my gut was working itself into a shit-fit and I was dehydrated and dizzy.

I was still mashing in the kitchen (this was the last time I would do that, by the way). Mash went well. Hit my temps. SWEET! Started my first runnings. Drip, drip, drip... Son of a bitch. Stuck sparge. Stuck the end of the mash paddle in and tried to work it against the braid but I figured out later that all I was doing was smashing the braid.

So, in my brewing youth, I decided it would be a good idea just to unscrew the ball valve from the front of the cooler. Grains went every fucking where along with my wort. I was able to hurry up and get the mash tun into the top of the kettle but now I had all kinds of grains and shit all over the place. Tripped the GFCI breaker, too. About that time, a guy I had met on HBT showed up (my first time ever meeting him). He came in and thankfully gave me a hand. Ended up dumping the mash into my kettle, removed the braid, re-installed the ball valve and a long hose but I put a nylon bag on the end of the tubing to filter the wort.

After that debacle, we started boiling. Wow... hit my SG. After a little while of drinking and chit chatting, I realized that my little timer had not moved anywhere. It was still just sitting on the 45 minute mark. No idea how long I had boiled for already. Shit!!!

Finally boiled her all up and transferred the wort into my brand new glass carboy (I only had better bottles before). Holy shit! The holes on the carboys are a shit-ton smaller thant he better bottles. I didn't have a bung. So, I had to drive to my LHBS to buy a $1.95 bung (20 miles away).

9.5 hour brew day.

Beer came out fantastic!