A Series of Unfortunate Brewing Accidents
It happens multiple times throughout a homebrewers career. You do your best to prevent mishaps large and small, but at the end of the day, human error is judge jury and executioner. Usually no one actually gets hurt in these accidents, and looking back, you can sometimes share a laugh with some friends about it down the road. I'm going to take this time to go over some of my finest hours in royally screwing up homebrew. Enjoy at my expense, and maybe learn how not to do things.
The Strawberry Lemon Explosion.
What a great evening for making some mead. Not unlike many nights, I felt like whipping up a batch of mead. This batch in particular, was based off the Joe's Ancient Orange Mead, but with strawberries and lemon. I purposely left plenty of headroom for some serious fermentation. I don't know if it was the acid boost from the lemon or the rapid rising properties of the bread yeast, but this ferment was like nothing I've ever seen.
The next morning there was several inches of foam just barely getting to the top of the neck of the carboy. Great I thought, usually the foamiest my batches get is overnight. I was sure I was safe to leave it while I went to work. When I came home to check on the batch (which was in the pantry with lots of food and pans around it), The airlock had foam leaking out the top. I cleaned the minor mess up, thankful that it didn't shoot the airlock all over the pantry spraying foam all over the pots, pans and food...
It didn't do that until the next morning.
The batch finally calmed down and I was happy that I didn't have to worry about it ever again after bottling it.
Expect The Unexpected
Nucleation Points 101.
Any mead maker practicing staggered nutrient additions has gone and thrown a tsp of dry yeast nutrient into a fermenting batch. They surely found out that it creates a lot of foam. Maybe they found out that it makes enough foam to evacuate the fermenter like a 3rd grade baking soda and vinegar volcano. When I was making my first set of lambic meads, I came to the conclusion that I needed to add Maltodextrin to the batches. I already knew that I needed to dissolve it before adding it in to avoid such an issue.
What I didn't know is that this stuff is a serious pain to dissolve fully, especially if you don't have enough liquid to do it (I didn't want to dilute my batch after all). What I saw in my measuring cup were some wet globs of Maltodextrin. I thought that it was soaked all the way through. I thought so, so wrong. There was a thin layer of wet powder encasing a lot of dry powder. When all that power hit the CO2 loaded mead, oh my god, you'll never see anything like it. The ensuing eruption beat any diet coke Mentos video on YouTube. The kicker was that it was that it took place in my kitchen and not a parking lot. The best part is that my wife was so used to me making an utter mess of the kitchen, that she didn't even turn from the couch to see what the sound of a city water fountain splattering water over concrete was.
A note to anyone who moved into my apartment: You can probably run a true open fermentor cool ship right in the kitchen with the amount of yeast and bugs I've plastered all over the walls and floor.
Be Sure To Read The Fine Print
The Dry Hopped Peppercorn Catastrophe.
This whole batch was a series of awful decisions front to back. This tale delves into those times when you try to do too much with a batch. This one in particular was supposed to be a peppercorn Saison mead. The recipe included honey and wheat DME. I was originally going to boil hops with some DME for that part of it. Unfortunately I forgot to boil, so I decided to dry hop them instead.
The mead fermented very nicely. It was an outstanding mead. I should have bottled it straight. But I had a plan, and I was going to stick with it. It was time to add the peppercorns. The peppercorns added spice very quickly. After a few days, I had found it to be acceptable so I added the dry hop. This is when it really starts to hit the fan. In that dry hop time the pepper had become dominating, and vomit inducing. Just awful. Seriously, if you're going to use black peppercorns, use like 3-4 corns, not 1.5 teaspoons of them. Well I knew that I could age the peppercorns out. I transferred to a secondary to find that the hops didn't really settle out (I didn't use a hop bag, another oops). They were just floating around in solution. Whatever, I'll try to filter it come bottling.
Here's why this would never work. The peppercorns needed time to mellow out. As you may know, beers with wheat should be consumed fresh, which as the peppercorns age, was becoming less and less so (fresh). By the time the peppercorns got to a tolerable amount, the batch had transformed into a muddy, unbalanced, still gross mess. I dumped all of it.
The real lesson here is to really plan your batches out, do research, and don't over complicate one batch by throwing a bunch of techniques and ingredients at it.
The Strawberry Lemon Explosion Pt 2.
Let's assume the Joe's ancient orange mead uses bread yeast, which in my findings, stops dead at around 12%, and isn't known for waking back up. This 12% was well short of the amount of sugar in the JOAM recipe, and the variant I created. Now, let's imagine moving in with the In-Laws and keeping your 8 bottle wine cellar on their bar (a proper place for it). Now picture your father in law's paperwork for his job strewn across this bar. You see where this is going. Ok, you got the bar, the wine cellar, and the paper work.
Now, let's go back to assuming I didn't stabilize the batch fermented with bread yeast (because it's supposed to be done) and threw it in the cellar. Now you raise a couple degrees on the temp controller to accommodate some nice red wine in the cellar. Ok, the picture is painted, and the play may begin.
There was a bad snowstorm that morning, so I didn't go to work (which turned out to be a good thing). My brother in law told me to come over and look at something in a rather concerned tone. I come out to the bar and see liquid leaking out of the cellar. Sticky liquid. Strawberry Lemon JAOV liquid. It pooled on the bar, drained onto a rug, down a mini fridge that was below it, behind the mini fridge and oh yeah, soaking all over my father in law's paperwork. That day was not fun.
Obviously the extra couple of degrees cause the yeast to come alive and begin fermenting (beyond 12%) in the bottles, as they had remained dormant for months. Thus pushing the cork out and spilling mead onto a bunch of property that wasn't mine. The only smart thing I did was open the other bottles and put them back into a carboy. They were all as carbed as soda and it's a miracle they all didn't go off. I did what any concerned brewer would do and threw a bunch of Brettanomyces at it.
Now, the very, absolute worst, kicking myself thing I did with this... Was not follow my own advice that I gave to a comment on this very batch!!!!! The lesson everyone should learn form this is, stabilize no matter what!
Let this be a note to all new brewers.
Sometimes when you're brewing, bad things will happen. It's important to not give up brewing and learn from your mistakes moving forward. Share your tales of woe with fellow brewers and they may tell you about some even worse mishaps than your own. So to channel my inner Finding Nemo, just keep brewing, just keep brewing.
It happens multiple times throughout a homebrewers career. You do your best to prevent mishaps large and small, but at the end of the day, human error is judge jury and executioner. Usually no one actually gets hurt in these accidents, and looking back, you can sometimes share a laugh with some friends about it down the road. I'm going to take this time to go over some of my finest hours in royally screwing up homebrew. Enjoy at my expense, and maybe learn how not to do things.
The Strawberry Lemon Explosion.
What a great evening for making some mead. Not unlike many nights, I felt like whipping up a batch of mead. This batch in particular, was based off the Joe's Ancient Orange Mead, but with strawberries and lemon. I purposely left plenty of headroom for some serious fermentation. I don't know if it was the acid boost from the lemon or the rapid rising properties of the bread yeast, but this ferment was like nothing I've ever seen.
The next morning there was several inches of foam just barely getting to the top of the neck of the carboy. Great I thought, usually the foamiest my batches get is overnight. I was sure I was safe to leave it while I went to work. When I came home to check on the batch (which was in the pantry with lots of food and pans around it), The airlock had foam leaking out the top. I cleaned the minor mess up, thankful that it didn't shoot the airlock all over the pantry spraying foam all over the pots, pans and food...
It didn't do that until the next morning.
The batch finally calmed down and I was happy that I didn't have to worry about it ever again after bottling it.
Expect The Unexpected
Nucleation Points 101.
Any mead maker practicing staggered nutrient additions has gone and thrown a tsp of dry yeast nutrient into a fermenting batch. They surely found out that it creates a lot of foam. Maybe they found out that it makes enough foam to evacuate the fermenter like a 3rd grade baking soda and vinegar volcano. When I was making my first set of lambic meads, I came to the conclusion that I needed to add Maltodextrin to the batches. I already knew that I needed to dissolve it before adding it in to avoid such an issue.
What I didn't know is that this stuff is a serious pain to dissolve fully, especially if you don't have enough liquid to do it (I didn't want to dilute my batch after all). What I saw in my measuring cup were some wet globs of Maltodextrin. I thought that it was soaked all the way through. I thought so, so wrong. There was a thin layer of wet powder encasing a lot of dry powder. When all that power hit the CO2 loaded mead, oh my god, you'll never see anything like it. The ensuing eruption beat any diet coke Mentos video on YouTube. The kicker was that it was that it took place in my kitchen and not a parking lot. The best part is that my wife was so used to me making an utter mess of the kitchen, that she didn't even turn from the couch to see what the sound of a city water fountain splattering water over concrete was.
A note to anyone who moved into my apartment: You can probably run a true open fermentor cool ship right in the kitchen with the amount of yeast and bugs I've plastered all over the walls and floor.
Be Sure To Read The Fine Print
The Dry Hopped Peppercorn Catastrophe.
This whole batch was a series of awful decisions front to back. This tale delves into those times when you try to do too much with a batch. This one in particular was supposed to be a peppercorn Saison mead. The recipe included honey and wheat DME. I was originally going to boil hops with some DME for that part of it. Unfortunately I forgot to boil, so I decided to dry hop them instead.
The mead fermented very nicely. It was an outstanding mead. I should have bottled it straight. But I had a plan, and I was going to stick with it. It was time to add the peppercorns. The peppercorns added spice very quickly. After a few days, I had found it to be acceptable so I added the dry hop. This is when it really starts to hit the fan. In that dry hop time the pepper had become dominating, and vomit inducing. Just awful. Seriously, if you're going to use black peppercorns, use like 3-4 corns, not 1.5 teaspoons of them. Well I knew that I could age the peppercorns out. I transferred to a secondary to find that the hops didn't really settle out (I didn't use a hop bag, another oops). They were just floating around in solution. Whatever, I'll try to filter it come bottling.
Here's why this would never work. The peppercorns needed time to mellow out. As you may know, beers with wheat should be consumed fresh, which as the peppercorns age, was becoming less and less so (fresh). By the time the peppercorns got to a tolerable amount, the batch had transformed into a muddy, unbalanced, still gross mess. I dumped all of it.
The real lesson here is to really plan your batches out, do research, and don't over complicate one batch by throwing a bunch of techniques and ingredients at it.
The Strawberry Lemon Explosion Pt 2.
Let's assume the Joe's ancient orange mead uses bread yeast, which in my findings, stops dead at around 12%, and isn't known for waking back up. This 12% was well short of the amount of sugar in the JOAM recipe, and the variant I created. Now, let's imagine moving in with the In-Laws and keeping your 8 bottle wine cellar on their bar (a proper place for it). Now picture your father in law's paperwork for his job strewn across this bar. You see where this is going. Ok, you got the bar, the wine cellar, and the paper work.
Now, let's go back to assuming I didn't stabilize the batch fermented with bread yeast (because it's supposed to be done) and threw it in the cellar. Now you raise a couple degrees on the temp controller to accommodate some nice red wine in the cellar. Ok, the picture is painted, and the play may begin.
There was a bad snowstorm that morning, so I didn't go to work (which turned out to be a good thing). My brother in law told me to come over and look at something in a rather concerned tone. I come out to the bar and see liquid leaking out of the cellar. Sticky liquid. Strawberry Lemon JAOV liquid. It pooled on the bar, drained onto a rug, down a mini fridge that was below it, behind the mini fridge and oh yeah, soaking all over my father in law's paperwork. That day was not fun.
Obviously the extra couple of degrees cause the yeast to come alive and begin fermenting (beyond 12%) in the bottles, as they had remained dormant for months. Thus pushing the cork out and spilling mead onto a bunch of property that wasn't mine. The only smart thing I did was open the other bottles and put them back into a carboy. They were all as carbed as soda and it's a miracle they all didn't go off. I did what any concerned brewer would do and threw a bunch of Brettanomyces at it.
Now, the very, absolute worst, kicking myself thing I did with this... Was not follow my own advice that I gave to a comment on this very batch!!!!! The lesson everyone should learn form this is, stabilize no matter what!
Let this be a note to all new brewers.
Sometimes when you're brewing, bad things will happen. It's important to not give up brewing and learn from your mistakes moving forward. Share your tales of woe with fellow brewers and they may tell you about some even worse mishaps than your own. So to channel my inner Finding Nemo, just keep brewing, just keep brewing.