Bamsdealer
Well-Known Member
Fun thread here. For all you intermediate to advanced homebrewers with a dozen or more brews under your belt who should have known better, post your rookie mistakes or doh moments and whether or not they amounted to anything. Off flavors, infections, lost product, bad recipes, etc. Don't post the mistakes you made as a beginner, but those that came when you should have known better.
I'll start off with a rather pricey imperial IPA I brewed this evening. The idea had good intentions. After experimenting with hop spiders, hop socks, tossing hops directly in the pot over 30ish beers I thought I had a bright idea to get maximum hop utilization, hardly any loss to hop matter with little mess and no extra time. Why not line my fermenter with a 5 gallon paint strainer bag soaked in star san and just dump my beer right in? Bad Idea. Dumped the entire batch right in the fermenter with all 9 oz of pellet hops, not thinking that it would clog... and so easily. Thought there would be plenty of surface area in that bag. Not so. I lifted the bag and looked at the one gallon of wort in my fermenter... and the beer was barely draining through the bag. To make matters worse, instead of setting the bag back in the bucket and racking off the cleared beer or leaving all the hop matter right in the fermenter, I decided to squeeze the bag a little thinking the pressure would force the wort through the paint strainer. I squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed. Looking back, I'm glad the bag didn't give... Instead, after the wort contacted my hands a little I said screw it and kept going... basically flowing over my hands for 5 minutes. I ended up with less beer in the fermenter than I would have liked and touched about every inch of wort. Oh well...
Here's to hoping I didn't invite on my first infection...
I'll start off with a rather pricey imperial IPA I brewed this evening. The idea had good intentions. After experimenting with hop spiders, hop socks, tossing hops directly in the pot over 30ish beers I thought I had a bright idea to get maximum hop utilization, hardly any loss to hop matter with little mess and no extra time. Why not line my fermenter with a 5 gallon paint strainer bag soaked in star san and just dump my beer right in? Bad Idea. Dumped the entire batch right in the fermenter with all 9 oz of pellet hops, not thinking that it would clog... and so easily. Thought there would be plenty of surface area in that bag. Not so. I lifted the bag and looked at the one gallon of wort in my fermenter... and the beer was barely draining through the bag. To make matters worse, instead of setting the bag back in the bucket and racking off the cleared beer or leaving all the hop matter right in the fermenter, I decided to squeeze the bag a little thinking the pressure would force the wort through the paint strainer. I squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed. Looking back, I'm glad the bag didn't give... Instead, after the wort contacted my hands a little I said screw it and kept going... basically flowing over my hands for 5 minutes. I ended up with less beer in the fermenter than I would have liked and touched about every inch of wort. Oh well...
Here's to hoping I didn't invite on my first infection...
