Fail Thread (mistakes you've made)

[Away]

I recently brewed 48L of AIPA. I made a double batch of wort, split it over two FVs and topped each to 24L. They both got 1 sachet of US-05. Into the Brew fridges they went, both set to 18C.

 

After about a week I did an SG on each and was surprised to find that one had almost finished (1.016) but the other was 1.030! I couldn't figure it out - everything was the same for each brew, except the gravity. Anyway, I left them for another 24 hours, which confirmed that one FV had indeed finished, but the other had come down by just one point, to 1.029.

 

I was scratching my noodle, staring at the second FV, when the stick-on thermometer caught my eye (I haven't been taking much notice of them since I got my STC-1000s.) The stick on thermometer said 15C! I quickly swapped probes and my worst fears were confirmed. The brew was indeed at 15C. A few more checks (thankfully I have a spare STC-1000) confirmed that the temperature probe was on the blink.

 

New probe fitted, the FV was then allowed to rise to 18C again and, thankfully, the yeast had not stalled. Three days later and the brew was where it should have been.

 

So, technically not a fail on my part, but a fail all the same. By the by, a packet of 10 replacement probes was just $13 on fleabay. Also, the samples I tasted of each batch do taste slightly different, with the brew that fermented "colder" seeming slightly more mellow and less bitter. I have no explanation for this, but the difference is noticeable.

 

Cheers

 

[bollus]

Like most of us, I've had the times when I wasn't watching the boil and had hot break all over the stove/counter top or didn't have the tap turned off before adding the water.

 

The most chaotic event. Sitting home one evening, wife ready to go out, me enjoying a beer. Heard a sound like a bird flying into the front window. Went to check and had to walk past the spot in the lounge / diner where I had my brews all bottled up and fermenting away nicely in the cardboard boxes they came in. Soon as I got to the spot I could hear a hissing sound!! Began moving boxes like a madman. Of course it had to be the last box that had the problem and as a pool of dark ale spread over the polished wood floor, I bent down to lift the offending box and move it into the kitchen. Cardboard and moisture don't mix and as I lifted the box up the bottom feel out and 3 PET bottles dropped out, hit the floor, shattered and became spinning Catherine wheels of dark beer spraying all over the dining room walls, floors, furniture.

 

Finally managed to get the bottles under control and in the sink. I am on my hands and knees with cloth's and buckets, in something that looks like a beer war zone when I hear The Minister for War and Finance exit the front door with an especially pointed final comment.

 

"That'll all be cleaned up by the time I get home, won't it". It was but it took me forever!!!

 

Found the original offending bottle and it appeared that it had blown out right under the base. Literally blew the base out of the bottle. So now I store all my PET bottles in plastic containers so if something like this ever happens again I have some method of containment.

[Casey Jones]

It not exactly a mistake as Ive only just put it in the fermenter.

1kg light malt

1 can Morgans Bock

Steeped 8 grams fuggles + 8 Grams Goldings - They were the remains of what I had from an English Bitter. I know its not in a typical Bock, but Im just experimenting.

 

This is the first time I steeped anything so Ill be interested to see what happens.

[ian.taylor4]

Was bottling and the blue-self closing poppet valve on the end of the bottle tube came off. Gushing out beer, quickly turned off the tap and cleaned up the mess. Crown sealed the beer. Had a spare bottling tube and finished bottling the rest of the batch.

 

Then realised that the blue poppet valve is in one of the bottles !

[Gasman]

Last night I made 23 litres of IPA using the following:

Coopers IPA 1.7kg extract, 1kg light malt extract tin, 500g powdered DME (added by accident) and coopers brew enhancer 2 (500g dextrose, 250g DME, 250g maltodextrin)

I pitched at 22 degrees with 11.5g US-05 yeast and dry hopped with 25g of Galaxy hops.

I'm worried I have added too much Malt. The OG was 1.063

This is the reason a father with 2 newborns who is running on little to no sleep should be allowed to homebrew without supervision. I realised immediately after that I went way too heavy with fermentables. Should I add more boiled cooled water? or a hop tea? do I need more yeast?

This is my second brew so I need your help.

Many thanks.

 

[Hairy]

Last night I made 23 litres of IPA using the following:

Coopers IPA 1.7kg extract' date=' 1kg light malt extract tin, 500g powdered DME (added by accident) and coopers brew enhancer 2 (500g dextrose, 250g DME, 250g maltodextrin)

I pitched at 22 degrees with 11.5g US-05 yeast and dry hopped with 25g of Galaxy hops.

I'm worried I have added too much Malt. The OG was 1.063

This is the reason a father with 2 newborns who is running on little to no sleep should be allowed to homebrew without supervision. I realised immediately after that I went way too heavy with fermentables. Should I add more boiled cooled water? or a hop tea? do I need more yeast?

This is my second brew so I need your help.

Many thanks.

[/quote']

It should be fine. The IPA kit is fairly bitter and will be able to handle the extra malt.

 

If you still have the kit yeast then you should pitch that too.

 

Do you have any more hops? A bigger dry hop would be nice.

[Ricko1525229757]

Did a brew on the weekend and didn't read the recipe correctly in relation to boil time. Assumed it was 60 mins but only put enough sparge water in for 60, but the boil time was 90. Consequently much less into the FV (didn't really want to water it down).

 

Add to that, on transfer to FV I accidently had left the tap open and lost some down the drain but not sure how much...as I had stepped away.....possibly about 2 litres. Should have had 20 in final batch but only had 15 given extra boil time and loss. Not the best effort. Just expecting that I will now end up with a higher ABV in the final beer, maybe that will be a positive out of the mistakes.

[Mark D Pirate]

So many mistakes !!

Lately its been not buying my grain pre cracked , trying to do it with a rolling pin was a huge pita and inconsistent .

Marked my bottling bucket wrong , picked that up when counted bottles so I've also been under priming but on upside my yields are higher than I thought .

Forgot to insert trivet in pot before giving it some more heat to mash out , bag was sitting on bottom of pot instead of 30 mm up (came out OK but that was just luck )

 

Biggest mistake was thinking homebrew would be a means to supply cheaper booze instead of a borderline obsession

[Greenyinthewestofsydney]

This Morning!!

 

Tape fell off the probe attached to the side of the FV overnight which was at a heat belt controlled 20c as part of my temp rise to FG for a dark ale done with US-05. Could hear the alarm at 5am in bed above the garage where I ferment. Come down and its fallen off and its reading ambient so the belt has been going for god knows how long. Temp at 27c in the fermenter but its like 2 or 3 points away from FG so hoping it wont cause any damage.

[Otto Von Blotto]

Need stronger tape. I was disappointed when I ran out of a roll of Duck branded tape, that stuff was bloody good for this purpose. It stuck so well that I could use it for two or three batches in a row and was bloody hard to remove too. No danger of that ever falling off.

[Mark D Pirate]

Need stronger tape. I was disappointed when I ran out of a roll of Duck branded tape' date=' that stuff was bloody good for this purpose. It stuck so well that I could use it for two or three batches in a row and was bloody hard to remove too. No danger of that ever falling off. [img']lol[/img]

I tried a few brands on my race cars , some are good for literally 100 MPH

[jeremy-o]

I was absolutely 100% convinced that my bottling wand would fit into the tap of an ALDI 10L springwater tub.

 

So convinced I filled it up with LME wort and yeast.

 

So convinced that I let it ferment and cold crash for three weeks.

 

So convinced that I sanitised and primed 8L worth of bottles.

 

So convinced that I soaked the kitchen floor with beer trying to get the wand in like I apparently did some point long ago. Turns out I actually didn't, because it doesn't even remotely fit.

 

(In the end I bottled my proper batch instead, then carved a hole in the top of the ALDI tub about PVC-tube size and used that to join it with the bottling wand. It was messy, I smell like beer, and I kind of rushed the bottling of my proper batch, but hell, I salvaged most of it and the good stuff is tasting real good with carbonation now under way.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Otto Von Blotto]

Well, I lost an entire keg today. Thankfully it wasn't beer though. Yesterday I mixed up a keg of lemon lime and bitters cordial and had it in the kegerator on gas at 45 PSI. Today I noticed the pressure had dropped a bit so I returned it to 45, then left for my arvo shift. About ten minutes after I left the relief valve in the lid decided to open up and spray all the liquid out of the keg and fling the fridge door open so there is now an empty keg and a sticky mess inside and out of the kegerator.

 

I'm gonna make another keg of it but this time I'll leave it in the fridge overnight on a lower pressure and then use the spare gas line to do a fast carb on it the following day. I noticed it wasn't well carbed yet, and I suspect due to it being of a higher SG with all the cordial in it than a beer would be at, it's harder for the CO2 to dissolve into it.

 

Cheers

 

Kelsey

[Morrie]

Ahh! - that will teach you a lesson pissing around with something other than beer.

 

On a more serious note Kelsey, did you ever get around to fitting a new hopper to your grain mill. My new hopper arrived today and I'm not sure where a small part goes? No instructions or diagram supplied. I guess I can phone CB about it.

[Otto Von Blotto]

It's even more stupid because soft drinks are what the damn things are designed for in the first place. Oh well, lesson learned

 

I haven't got my new hopper yet because I haven't been down to CB. I'm planning to pick one up next time I go there for base malts, because I really can't be bothered driving 35 minutes for one little item. Apparently there are some instructions on the CB website on the product listing, although looking at them it doesn't really explain a whole lot.

[Morrie]

Thanks mate. Yep I found the PDF file diagram and it is part number 5. It looks like it directs grain away from the edge of the mill where the cogs are.

Apologies to other forum users for me being off topic here.

[Mark D Pirate]

Couldn't be worse than IKEA instructograms ....Any nation that doesn't see either real daylight or night time for months will get that slight " Tyler Durden " streak going and just throw parts from the Fartfull gardening bench into something else .... hell i bloody would !

[Morrie]

All good Marko, nothing came with the kit in the way of destructions but the PDF diagram that is available on the CraftBrewer web site is very adequate. The kit looks very nice and will look much better and I hope work a bit better than the one I made out of perspex laying around my shed.

[Otto Von Blotto]

Glad it worked out mate. I'm looking forward to getting one too, I still have the old perspex one that came with it originally. It works ok although part of the gear guard is broken off; luckily the piece was saved and I just sit it in there loose to stop grains going through uncracked. It only holds about 1kg or so of grains though. With this new one holding a few kg, plus a new mill mount in the works (to simply sit the mill on top of the catching bucket), I should only need about 5 minutes to mill grains for any given recipe.

[Morrie]

The perspex one I made just had a slot in the bottom whereas the new aluminium one from CB looks like it directs the grain more directly into the centre of the rollers. I found a few whole grains getting through the mill with my perspex one, but I'm not sure if that is normal or I was getting a few bypassing because of my design. I have my roller gap set at 1.2mm for now. If I still find whole grains getting through after the new hopper is fitted then I will probably go down to a 0.9mm roller gap for a trial.

[Otto Von Blotto]

Turns out it wasn't actually the relief valve that opened up, the beer/liquid line actually blew clean off the tube that it is connected to in the font that leads up to the tap. This does make more sense to me given that the kegs are rated to 130PSI and it was only sitting on 45.

 

I made up a fresh keg today, reconnected the beer line to its tube, and put it back in at 45PSI again. This time however, I left the liquid disconnect off the post so that the pressure isn't in the line. My red ale keg is close to empty too so I will switch this soda keg over to that line when it does empty. Once the stout keg is empty, the next three beer kegs will be ready to go in, at which point the soda keg will be removed, the fridge given a bloody good clean out, and the beer lines more securely connected to their respective font tubes. When carbonating at high pressure like that I'll still keep the liquid disconnects off the kegs just in case.

 

Hopefully this sort of shit doesn't happen again!

[porschemad911]

Tonight I bottled up my pilsner. This batch is tasting really nice, but it did remind me of a past fail.

 

The last time I brewed a pils it came out too sweet, with not enough bitterness to balance the malt. Originally I put it down to the yeast strain and possibly over-adjusting for no-chill in my calculations. I just realized that for some reason Craftbrewer had written 5% AA on the Saaz hops when it was listed as being 3.4% AA on their website.

 

I targeted 40 IBUs in that beer, using amounts based on 5% AA, and it didn't taste anywhere near that bitterness level. For this pilsner I targeted 37 IBUs using amounts based on 3.4% AA and it tastes much more like I would expect!

[Mark D Pirate]

Siphoning off the MO / Chinook into Fv after chilling ..... Some dcikhead forgot to even get the tap from the bucket of star-san and fit it .... bit wet sticky puddle of wort on the tiles 2.5 litres gone , only mopped the floor this morning so now i guess i'll have to do it again .

know full well i'm not the first to do this but this thread needed a bump anyway

[prof_grainbrain]

Rapidly Cold crashed my Citra Pale on the weekend, set the fridge and went out for the day. Checked in the evening - it had hit 1C- realised I'd forgotten to disconnect the blow-off.

 

Sucked about half a pint plus of star san solution through 1.5m of 8mm hose into the fermenter.

 

Don't ask why I had so much star san for the airlock.....

 

Interestingly the solution was floating on top of the beer, so I made the decision last night to rack it into bottles anyway and avoid the top.

 

Anyway, my beer went from this awesome citra-burst-aroma and all-round delicious pale ale to ..... umm a sour

 

Not sure if I've done the right thing bottling it.....

[jeremy-o]

So a bit over a month ago I sliced a chunk off the end of my thumb in our ancient, never-maintained paper guillotine at work, which was my major recent epic fail... It meant I had to put off bottling the bock I had going for a couple of extra weeks, and I'm only just at the stage where I've caught up with time (and hand function) to brew again today.

 

But this week when I was getting my proverbial together I opened the brew fridge and discovered it was very warm. Two out of three of the yeast slurries I had hastily salvaged when bottling had restarted a healthy fermentation with some bug or other, and in the humid fridge my awesomely sturdy homemade muslin brew bag (I keep it in the egg/butter rack) was covered in mold. Had to bleach out the fridge and chuck the bag. Picked up a new one today but it's not the same...

 

Anyway. At least I'm back in the saddle. Feels good.