Beer Disaster(I'm an idiot)

[Cuckoo Barmy]

Over the last couple of years my brewing has steadily got better. I've made the same mistakes that most inexperienced brewers have made. But those are just part of the learning process and you accept it. Having recently changed to liquid yeast with increasingly good results I had high hopes for my latest brew. It was going to be ready early august so I put all my hard earned knowledge (and that of a few here) and designed a nice light summer ale that would be refreshing, hoppy and not too strong around 4.2%. My now well rehearsed brewday routine went particularly smoothly as did the fermentation hitting exactly my target O.G + F.G. AI had a quick taste when measuring this and I was already impressed this was the best beer I'd ever made!
Keen not to mess things up with any contamination in the barrel or in the process of transfer I studiously took apart and cleaned everything! Once I was sure everything was clean I added my primer gave it a stir then poured it into my shining King Keg. I left it determined to avoid coming back and sampling the beer for at least 3 weeks. (I brew in a cabin in the garden)
FOOL!
Just 3 days later I went to check on it. To my horror as I opened the door I could smell beer, At first I thought one of the bottles I keep there had popped its lid. But no it was worse than than I looked straight at my barrel and noticed it had hardly any beer in it! As I walked towards it I became aware of a sticky wet patch on the floor and just to confirm my fear at the same time the tap dripped.
I'd stripped and cleaned the valve as if it were going to be part of a surgical procedure but of all the idiotic things I hadn't closed it

God I am pissed off!

[GARYSMIFF]

I feel your Pain Buddy

Now go make some more

[beermonsta]

been there...done that! well similar...

Was busy doing a brew and demonstrating the process to a keen new brewer who wanted to get into all grain brewing. As I started the sparge process, I opened the valve on the mash tun to fill the boiler, and beautiful wort began to flow into the bottom of the boiler. I carried on talking to him for some time before I decide to check the level in the boiler. Hmmm, it's not as high as I expected. Oh sh!t I'd left the boiler tap open. All the high gravity wort had trickled right out onto the floor outside the shed. Bugger!

Done other idiotic things too...Put a nice brew in the shed to ferment. Once main fermentation had subsided the bubbler came to a halt so I decided to give the brew a week or two to condition before racking. As the weather outside was very cold I checked every night that the beer haddn't frozen by having a quick look at the bubber liquid and a quick tap to see the liquid move around and all seemed well.
Then one cold evening I went to do another check and noticed the light hitting the fv didn't quite look right. The bubbler liquid was fine but to my horror the Fv was frozen solid Turns out that the sanitising solution in the bubbler solution had lowered it's freezing point - a bit like antifreeze.

I reckon this thread should turn into "whats the most stupid thing you've done!"

[Steve B]

Also been there & done that - more than once!

My current idiocy is not being able to hit anything like mash temp despite having hot water at the temp strike calculators specify. After 3 dodgy brews that needed additional boiling water to get them anywhere near to 65 degrees or so (they ended up more like a thin soup than a porrage in the mash tun) the reason finally hit - the elements are fairly high up in the new boiler I made. Hot water rises and cold water falls. I was measuring near the top - what was going into the mash tun was the best part of 10 degrees lower in temp than needed. Kicked self when realised - but glad I eventually twigged - its been driving me mad!

[fullclaret]

My last brewday started at 5:15am when my 2 youngest daughters woke up. I'd got everything ready the night before, water treated, grains weighed, mash tun cleaned so was optimistic of finishing by 11am. When I heated the water for mashing to 72oC as usual I was surprised that the grains dropped the temp to 48o rather than the target 63o (I leave 15 mins then add 2-3 litres of boiling water to get to 66-67o). So I quickly added about 5-6 litres of boiling water but it still wasn't rising enough. I finally got it to 67o... then realised I was reading Farenheit not celcius. It was at 75oC and I had about 20 litres of water for a 23 litre brew so down the sink it went

Note to self, restrict the number of beers the night before a brewday

[dave-o]

Also been there & done that - more than once!

My current idiocy is not being able to hit anything like mash temp despite having hot water at the temp strike calculators specify. After 3 dodgy brews that needed additional boiling water to get them anywhere near to 65 degrees or so (they ended up more like a thin soup than a porrage in the mash tun) the reason finally hit - the elements are fairly high up in the new boiler I made. Hot water rises and cold water falls. I was measuring near the top - what was going into the mash tun was the best part of 10 degrees lower in temp than needed. Kicked self when realised - but glad I eventually twigged - its been driving me mad!

You need to regularly stir water in the boiler, but i guess you know this now.

[spook100]

I woke up on Sunday morning to find a huge puddle of beer around my fridge. I had poured myself a pint from my corny the night before and left both the gas and beer line with party tap connect. When I had closed the fridge door the party tap had become wedged between the door and the keg, depressing the handle and dispensing 30 pints of beer into the fridge .

[fego]

Ah, the old left tap open trick...





That was on a day when she went out. I was hoping to have done and dusted a whole brew before she got back without ever knowing but the tap left open trick left me in a sticky situation in more ways than one

[gregorach]

Worst disaster I've had recently all started going wrong when I got to about 40 minutes into the boil, only to spot the hop strainer still lying on the table...D'oh!

[simco999]

Forgot hop strainer - tick.
Smashed Hydrometer - tick.
Allowed 30 odd litres of water to leak from my cooler into wort - tick.
Left tap open - tick.

Definition of an expert - a person who has made all possible errors in a limited field of knowledge.

BTW - I'm no expert - I've got lots to balls up on yet.

[gnorwebthgimi]

I hear you Simco, here's a few more to try:

Spill all mashed grain (I did this by the bins outside and it felt like an apocalypse, god help you if you do it indoors)
Stir mash with a thermometer and it breaks in half
Add yeast to improperly chilled wort and kill it dead
Add wrong yeast to cooled wort
Barrel over pressurises and leaks through a crack that develops on the bottom

I have my own open tap story: once let cooled wort for a dark beer spill onto beige carpet due to open tap on FV
There's probably a few more I've missed, some are too painful to remember.

[micromaniac]

Worst disaster I've had recently all started going wrong when I got to about 40 minutes into the boil, only to spot the hop strainer still lying on the table...D'oh!

i do this nearly every brew .....it,s part of my brewing method now

[oldbloke]

Not exactly a disaster with the brewing process, but way back when (1971 to be precise) I had a few of the lads round to sample my latest (it was rub, but so strong nobody cared after half a pint).
Dispensed from a demi via a syphon tube. On top of the piano. Somebody didn't close the tap properly.
My mum didn't really want an authentic barrelhouse honytonk sound when she was playing The Messiah.

[Steve B]

Barrel over pressurises and leaks through a crack that develops on the bottom

I've had 2 barrels split in the past couple of months. Both times the pressure relief valve failed

[Cuckoo Barmy]

Oh yes I've had the split barrel problem as well. but that was also due to brain fade. First time I used an S30 cylinder I thought it would be self regulating! Next thing I know my barrel is the shape of a ball despite the safety valve blowing!