Beer Forum

I don't think anything else could have gone wrong....

I just wrote a blog about my brew day yesterday... Though I don't think that I can call it a brew day... Nothing was actually brewed.


http://brosbeerhomebrew.blogspot.com/20 ... s-law.html


Cranny

One year I invited everyone from my brew club over to brew a beer I was making for our local beer festival. It was going to be our club's IPA offering for the homebrew portion of the event. I ran out of propane, Spilled some grain, lost the coupling between my chiller and the hose, burned the hops (I can't recall how I started them of fire, but it happened). We called it Murphy's Law IPA and it was a hit at the fest, even with the short and non-VigArous boil and all that went wrong. It happens to everyone at some point. Brew on!!

Yeah, I've brewed three other batches since that one... I have ordered a SS false bottom, but haven't installed it yet

Pump frooze up on me in the beginning, had to sand the shaft down, then the propane regulator stopped working, tried three bottles. Appears to be reducing to a lower than the 30 psi setting. 120 Minute boil to achieve boil off, should call it a simmer not a boil. Ran out of O2 during transfer. That is what I get when friends call up at the last minute and want to brew. Oh well. Time to perform some maintanence on the brew system.

It Happens. I am willing to bet that you still made beer.

One day, as I was setting up my sparge bucket, the plastic table holding my mash tun collapsed send ten pounds of grain across the patio.

When I moved into my current place a few years ago, I thought it was cursed for the first few months. Every brew had some catastrophe or another. Some crowd favorites:

The pump wouldn't prime so while 2 of us were on the porch trying to get it running, the hose running from the kitchen faucet to clean out the mashtun was forgotten. 20 minutes & 2" of standing water. The other guy runs off to hunt one down & I soak every towel in the house, making absolutely no visible progress. We were still cleaning up the mess when it was time to rack over to the fermenter.

I had everything started up, water heating & forgot to mill the grain the night before like I usually do. In my haste I knocked the full hopper all over the carpet. It was pretty much the last of my base malt. No brew that day.

The first 'successful' brew day here I was so proud of myself for everything going right while I cleaned up. Then as I was hauling the grain out to the trash (crossing through the living room, the bag split as I was at the top of the stairs. 17-18 pounds of robust porter grist on the walls, the railing, the ceiling... it looked like a grain bomb went off. Real fun to clean out of the carpet.

There were some other ones not quite as 'fun' as those ... stuck mashes, burns, scalds, breaking hydrometers, losing thermometers in the mash or snowbanks ... What a great hobby, eh? Recently I fired the pump on my HERMS coil & realized I disconnected a hose as I heard the gurgle. About a half cup of 170F wort to the chest & neck.

That Murphy guy really was on to something. Maybe he was a brewer when he wasn't fucking up the Air Force's equipment.

I had my own problems on December 31. I posted pics at:
http://bullybrew.tumblr.com/post/393126 ... -things-it


Brew disaster!!! In the big scope of things it wasn’t getting burned, blown up, or sliced open by a broken carboy. But I did leave the ball valve open on my giant brewpot and had the sweet first running spill all over the patio. I decided to brew on. I had about a gallon and a half of the first running, sparged as usual and am going ahead with the brew. Instead of a ten gallon batch it will be a 5 gallon batch. I added about a pound of DME, that I had in the fridge for starters, to the boil. I hopped it with a 1/2 ounce of Columbus (60) and 3 oz of Centennial at 0 (which I let stand for about 15 minutes before I started cooling). I also used S-05 yeast.