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MichaelBD

MichaelBD

Siamese Brewer
Joined
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Just like the title says... I'll start by telling you mine. It's probably the dumbest mistake, felt like shooting myself in the head yesterday!!

Well I brewed a 5 gallon batch of Hefeweizen last two weeks and got an UNSUALLY low OG. Was aiming for 1.052, but I got 1.025. I'm pretty new to all grain brewing and was frustrated since I had better results on my previous non-wheat brews. I re-checked everything for my 2nd batch yesterday, recalibrated my refractometer, used a hydrometer to test against the refractometer, reset my mill gap, milled the wheat twice, tried batch instead of fly sparging, etc. and the OG still turned out at 1.025.... Well after alot of swearing, cursing, cigarettes, alcohol, and head scratching. I decided to go do some research and reading. Still no luck since the answers on most forum posts were about efficiency, mill gaps, sparging techniques, etc which I have corrected already.... And then after much reading I came across the MALTING process... yes that's right.... MALTING!!! The wheat grains I got were not MALTED!! They were just grains freshly harvested from some wheat farm waiting to be malted....
I feel like a royal idiot and had a good laugh about this with a friend. I hope no one makes this mistake or will beat this HAHAHAHAHAHA!


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew
 
How did you happen to get raw wheat directly from a farm? That is a bit unusual for most people. Few folks these days have access to a farm like that. While it is a nice thing to be able to do that, it's definitely atypical.

To be fair, I think that most brewing books and other resources assume you are getting malt from a source such as a homebrewing store, where you would have to ask for unmalted grain specifically. While unmalted wheat is sometimes used in brewing - mostly for lambics - you would normally use it as an adjunct, about half of the grain bill at most, and never as the entire grist. Even with malted wheat, you would normally have at least 40% of the grain bill as barley malt in a weizen, as wheat malt is hard to sparge (no hulls - you would need to add rice hulls to form the grain bed) and generally has low diastatic power (60-90° Lintner - enough to self-convert, but still lower than most malted barley).

My worst mistake? Well, yesterday I began bottling a porter before taking a hydrometer reading. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Except that, as it turns out, the fermentation had stuck at a gravity of 1.025, about fifteen points above the expected FG... I had to pour the entire batch back into the fermenter and hope I didn't get an infection or excessively aerate it... not such a terrible mistake, perhaps, but an embarrassing one to be sure.
 
Yesterday I bottled my Simcoe/Amarillo IPA. I dry hopped into the primary without a bag (no issue) and I also did not remember to at least chill it to precipitate the hop debris.

Attempted the mesh bag over the autosiphon but that clogged up pretty quickly

Long story short....about 1 gallon of crap left in the bottling bucket that was just to murky to bottle. 4 gallon batch with priming sugar for a 5 gallon....lovely.
 
This just happened to me this weekend.

Basically I read my volume measuring stick wrong and I added 1 gallon more than I thought at every step (mash water volume, pre-boil volume and post boil volume going into the fermentor). The good news is I had higher efficiency that I planned for - 83.1% than the 74% I set the recipe up for. I hit my pre-boil gravity (despite having 1 extra gal), but my OG was 5 points less than predicted (1.048 vs 1.053).
 
A few weeks ago I was adding oak chips I soaked in whisky to my Carboy and accidentally dropped the spoon in. If the beer turns out to be really good I'm going to send it to contest with spoon under special ingredients


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Jut about a month ago I made a yeast starter by boiling my dme in 2qts of water. I took it over poured into my sterilized 1 gallon growler and proceeded to pitch the yeast directly into the hot starter wort before cooling. :smack:
 
Last summer I brewed a Premium American Lager. I had the beer connected to a blow hose with the end of the hose submerged in a pitcher of Star San solution. It fermented just fine for three weeks but I didn't have the space available yet in my keezer. I thought I'd have some space in the next week or so, so I decided to cold crash the lager. I dropped the controller down to 36F and walked away. The next week I opened the keezer and saw that the sanitizer solution had been sucked into the carboy and that there was distinct layer of sanitizer and beer in the fermenter. I salvaged it but I was disappointed with it and learned a lesson.
 
I was pumping boiling wort through my plate chiller and back into the pot to sanitize. I had the hose in one hand directed in the top of the pot, and I got distracted by something and my hand drifted and I started pumping wort all over the place including the running propane burner. It extinguished the flame and put out a huge plume of steam. I was screaming at my helper to shut the propane off so we didn't explode.

Whoops.
 
masteraviator said:
Yup. I've done it. I wonder how many others have? I pitched my stir bar into my wort with my yeast starter.
Click to expand...

Heh, I had to buy extra since I pitched my 2 into beers! haha

Now I keep magnets next to the stirplate to remind me to magnet them out before pitching.
 
I recall two incidents during Covert Hops Society group brews that would count. The first was during the 2012 summer brew; the brewers in charge put an immersion chiller into Tin Man (the BK) to sanitize it, fifteen minutes before flameout. At the intended flameout time, they then began running cool water through the chiller, running it for a good half an hour, but were puzzled that it seemed to be having no effect. Finally, someone noticed smoke coming from one of the hoses - they had forgot to turn off the propane, and the hose was hanging down into the flame.

The second mistake was about a year later, in the Summer 2013 group brew. This time, they were using a plate chiller. They hooked up the water lines and wort lines, and began running it through, but lo and behold, the wort was coming out barely any cooler than it had started at, and the water outflow was only lukewarm. It took ten minutes for someone to realize that the water lines were running in the same direction as the wort lines, rather than counter...

The odd thing is, this was a group of experienced brewers, and none of us noticed the problems that were going on, including myself. Of course, we'd all been swapping bottles around for tasting since 9 AM on both of those days, which may have had something to do with it.
 
One could make a good argument that STARTING to brew would be the biggest mistake. It is a slippery slope, my friend.

MichaelBD said:
And then after much reading I came across the MALTING process... yes that's right.... MALTING!!! The wheat grains I got were not MALTED!!
Click to expand...
Oh, that is excellent! Kind of like learning to drive and somehow neglecting to note the steering wheel for the first few miles ... er ... yards. Yeah, you won't get very far. Hope you experiences have improved since then.
 
I've had a couple. Probably my worst was a batch of Rauchbier I had spent all morning brewing. I've heard all the horror stories about glass carboys being fragile, so I'm extra-careful with mine, even ensuring that they're never sitting directly on concrete. I always lay down some cardboard or something first. I brew in my garage, so I grabbed a box from the recycling bin to set the carboy on while racking the cooled wort to it, then turned my attention to cleaning the mash tun. As the carboy filled, it of course got heavier, and eventually the box it was sitting on collapsed unevenly, causing the carboy to tip over and shatter all over my garage floor.

A more recent story: I'm brewing the Pliny the Bastid recipe, and I'm at the part where you dry hop it 3 times. I don't want to leave hops in the fermenter too long, so for the first round of hops, I had the brilliant idea of sanitizing my hop sock, then putting the hops into the carboy in the hop sock, tying it off with some dental floss so I could remove them when it's time for the next round of hops. Well, last night it was time to remove the first round of dry hops and add the second one. Except as I pulled the hop sock up out of the carboy, it instead held a spherical shape, refusing to stuff its way back out the neck of the carboy. I ended up having to rack the beer to another carboy, then inverting the empty carboy and shaking the hops out of the neck of the carboy so I could get the bag out. I guess I should have seen that one coming.
 
Zoidberg said:
Jut about a month ago I made a yeast starter by boiling my dme in 2qts of water. I took it over poured into my sterilized 1 gallon growler and proceeded to pitch the yeast directly into the hot starter wort before cooling. :smack:
Click to expand...

Wow, you're lucky the growler didn't break! Admit it: there MUST have been a few glasses of homebrew consumed during this activity, no? ;)
 
I was draining my mash tun into the kettle. I walked away for just few minutes and my little girl came in and said "Daddy, why is the floor wet?". Lost the entire batch but thank god it was outside. Now I always check to make sure my valves are closed.


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Luckily, the worst thing that was happened with me (so far) is forgetting to check the BK valve. Starting pouring hot wort in and lost about a half gallon on myself.
 
This noob treated water to "amber ale wonderful" using MgSO4 (Epsom), gypsum and Calcium chloride with the use of a recipe software available online. I used this nicely doctored water for an... extract batch. :eek:
 
I had my chiller boiling in my wort to sanitize, which still had from water in it. I turned the water on to start chilling my wort, the boiling water sprayed me in the face and head. It burned me surprisingly bad.
 
i was checking on my Brown ale last week. i hadn't checked on it for a few days and was going to take a sample out of the racking spout. i opened the stand up freezer and noticed it was a bit cold but didnt think much of it. i opened the valve and nothing came out. i thought it was clogged or something. Then i realized that all 13 gallons of beer was completely frozen solid. i must have knocked the temp probe out and it was laying on the floor of my heated shed. the freezer had been running full blast for who knows how long. The temp was at 14 degrees inside the freezer.
 
1. Turned off one valve on my CO2 distributor when I pulled an empty keg. A few weeks later, I added a new keg and was mystified by the lack of pressure. I was prepping to pull the keg and rack the beer before I thought to look.

2. I've left valves open. Multiple times. Check the stinking valves!

3. Using an immersion chiller, I turned the water on full blast. Blew the clamp off the copper and sprayed water into my beer and soaked the kitchen. I'd guess that I added at least 1/2 gallon to the wort.
 
masteraviator said:
Yup. I've done it. I wonder how many others have? I pitched my stir bar into my wort with my yeast starter.
Click to expand...

I have done this a few times:( but on my first batch, I saw it go in, and instinctively reached in to grab it. That's right, stuck my nut sanitized arm, up to the elbow, into my bucket of freshly cooled wort. What was astounding was it turned out infection free. Actually was one of my better beers. Now when I pitch the bar, I leave it in, with no ill effects.
 
NervousDad said:
I had my chiller boiling in my wort to sanitize, which still had from water in it. I turned the water on to start chilling my wort, the boiling water sprayed me in the face and head. It burned me surprisingly bad.
Click to expand...

I did this, except it soaked my shirt with boiling water, witch proceeded to stick to my skin and burn me even worse. I had some good blisters from that one.
 
I have racked the fermenter to the bottling bucket more than once with the spigot "on". I have also left the spigot nut too loose and had to scrub and iodophor my arm before reaching in to the wort to stop the leaking.
 
I was making an IPA about a year and a half ago and somehow I measured grains wrong and wound up with about 30% less than the recipe called for.

Doughed in and thought "Hm, that looks like a thin mash."

Checked the temp. "Hm. The temperature is WAY off from Green Bay Rackers' usually accurate predictions."

A series of red flags popped up throughout the rest of the day and I somehow managed to dismiss all of them. When I checked the OG at the end and found an OG of something like 1.030, THEN the light bulb clicked on, and I figured out I had made a mistake.

Wound up with a pretty good session pale ale, though.
 
I brewed a double IPA Saturday and after I got it into the fermenter and everything I started cleaning up and found my glass cooktop had cracked from the heat of the burner and weight of the pot. SWMBO wasn't too happy. ImageUploadedByHome Brew1393268148.992474.jpg
 
This one was a close one. I wanted to make a Heady Topper clone, and wanted to make a conan yeast starter from can dregs. Finally found a SINGLE can after months of trying. From a single can, you want to do 3 or 4 steps to get up to pitching range.

So I boil a bit of DME, and it's cooling. I sanitize the can top in preparation while the wort cools from boiling temp. When it was around 130deg, I thought "Hey, the couple ounces of beer are cold, maybe it'll help cool the wort" not thinking about the fact that it'll kill the yeast.

Moments after dumping it in, I realized how GODDAMN STUPID that was, and how I just nuked something I worked so hard to get. Immediately I cooled it as fast as I could, in an ice bath, praying to the yeast gods the whole time. In fact, most of them pulled through, and I ended up making a killer clone. Whoops!!!


EPILOGUE
So I was doing an American IIPA recently, and I wanted to proof dry yeast. Without really thinking, I boiled and cooled water to the proofing temperature.... of gelatin. 100 degrees. and dumped the yeast in. I had the temps mixed up in my brain. Seriously, I don't even drink while doing these things, I guess I'm stupid enough already!
 
The first time I tried all grain I wanted to just make a test batch. I went to a local "natural" type store that has a lot of grains. Bought a bunch of barley and wheat, grinded it using a blender, and mashed it. Ended up with an OG that was almost non-existent....because similarly to the OP, none of it was malted.

Bonus story: This one turned out drinkable, but my next all grain batch was gonna be a huge christmas beer. I got all the stuff from a LHBS and went to work. I used the Papazian bucket method for a lauter tun, spilled at least a gallon of wort all over the floor. Then proceeded to collect almost twice as much runoff as I was supposed to, which led me to boiling it using three different sized pots. Ended up with an OG that was abismal, so I added 5lbs of brown sugar because I refused to lose this one. Forgot to take a FG reading, so who knows what the abv is. After bottling it turned out ok...barely. My relatives enjoyed it during the christmas holiday, but I'm not so proud of it.
 
On a doubleheader bottling day (chocloate coffee stout and black IPA), I accidentally added the pot of coffee to the Black IPA bottling bucket. Oddly enough, the beer turned out great. In fact, when a buddy wanted to brew it later, he insisted on recreating the "mistake."

I guess if that's my worst, I'm doing ok.
 
I was siphoning a stout into the primary, and for some reason there was a ton of trub in this one. No matter, I had a paint strainer bag in the bucket to collect it. The siphon got clogged, and instead of stopping, taking it apart, and cleaning it, I decided to pump on it. You guessed it - beer explosion. There was beer and debris on the walls, on the ceiling and on me. Not the best way to end brew day...
 
quincy07 said:
I brewed a double IPA Saturday and after I got it into the fermenter and everything I started cleaning up and found my glass cooktop had cracked from the heat of the burner and weight of the pot. SWMBO wasn't too happy. View attachment 181837
Click to expand...
OMG. So sorry. That really sucks. Makes me glad I tough out the 10F temperatures and brew on a propane burner.

djfriesen said:
On a doubleheader bottling day (chocloate coffee stout and black IPA), I accidentally added the pot of coffee to the Black IPA bottling bucket. Oddly enough, the beer turned out great. In fact, when a buddy wanted to brew it later, he insisted on recreating the "mistake."

I guess if that's my worst, I'm doing ok.
Click to expand...
I have seen a coffee IPA before. Even though are probably my 2 favorite styles separately, it wasn't great. But maybe in a black IPA because you want some of that roastiness.
 
Being cheap, I wanted to propagate a single lager smack pack into enough cells to split between a high gravity maibock and a high gravity marzen (Oktoberfest). YeastCalc called for a metric ton of cells, which was going to take three steps on a stir plate using a one gallon pickle jar to get the required amount.

I buy a stir bar and smack pack from the LHBS for $10 and build a stir plate out of a cigar box. Step 1 goes well, and after 24 hours goes into the refrigerator to cold crash for another 24 hours. The next day, I make a bunch more wort, pour it into the pickle jar, and then wonder where I'd put the stir bar. I look and look, but I can't find it. Another trip to the LHBS for ANOTHER $10 stir bar. I drop it in, tip the pickle jar to the side to get the stir bar to the side to line it up with the stir plate's magnets, tip it back up and center it onto the stir plate.

Try as I might, I cannot get the stir bar to stir the wort. It does nothing but rattle around, but not being able to see it through the wort I cannot tell what's going on. I decide to fish it out using another magnet.

And as I'm dragging the magnet up the side of the pickle jar I see why. There's two stir bars in the jar, 69ing each other with their N and S poles.

The maibock is currently cold crashing in my garage and will be kegged tonight to lager in the keezer for a couple of months, and the marzen just got pulled out of the keezer for a diacetyl rest.
 
MikeInMKE said:
There's two stir bars in the jar, 69ing each other with their N and S poles.
Click to expand...
Hilarious!

And FYI, next time you want to use the same yeast pretty close together, look into using a portion of the first batch's yeast cake for the next batch. Each batch of beer is basically a big starter (or each starter is a small batch of beer :)). But if you use it from a batch of beer, you get the drink the beer unlike making huge starters.
 
when I first started all-grain I went through maybe a year or so of agonizing over an off taste in all my batches. It was this awful astringent aftertaste, just terrible. I suspected water chemistry, and mash ph were the culprits. I got a ph meter, had a water test, got different acids and buffers for water treatment... and the taste was still there. Finally I had a more experienced brewer try it and he said "what temp are you mashing at"? 152, why? "your mash temps are off". Turns out my thermometer was off by about 15 deg. so in reality I was mashing at 167 and sparging at about 188. Doh, I felt like the worlds biggest idiot.
 
I was sitting next to the boiling wort of an english barleywine.. friend came over to stir the hops back in (you know, that ring of hops that sticks to the side of the boil kettle). A few times during the boil I thought to myself "maybe I should not be sitting so close to 32 liters of boiling sugary mixture". Then friend spilled boiling wort on my sock, sock stuck to my foot. I couldn't wear my combat boots for 2 days.. aoutch

I never sat close to the boil kettle again.
 
Mash tun valve, lost about 2 cups of water.

Anyways, today I got my new Bavarian Bock from Austin Homebrew and I accidentally ordered liquid extract based recipe. Oh well, I'll brew it and then get an all grain for the saved yeast.
 

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