Balls Ups

[AngelTearsOnMyTongue]

Capping a stubbie I'm drinking while bottling and drinking a stubbie that I haven't capped, never drink much though............................

Oh god. I can imagine me doing that.

On my first brew, before my homemade capper was in operation (Photo in thread "What fermenter do you use?"), I was using a hand capper and after capping about 10 stubbies (took me about 1/2Hr) I realised I hadnt primed them. Those hand cappers are a ******* too.

ATOMT

 

[RobW]

Made a yeast starter in a 2 litre container & left it overnight. It must have taken off faster than I anticipated because the next day I couldn't get the lid off because of the pressure. How to let the pressure out? Drill a hole through the cap with the electric drill - just a little one. Well it shot out like a fire hose, all over the ceiling & all over me when I put my finger over the hole to try & stop it. Still pitched it after sanitizing the lid & it was fine - but it did take a while to get the ceiling clean.

 

[Keifer]

After hooking up my first keg to the gas, i put the beer line on and had forgotten to check that the tap was off! it wasn't

 

[Chatty]

And this one time, on band camp...

Chatty

 

[stephen]

Capping a stubbie I'm drinking while bottling and drinking a stubbie that I haven't capped, never drink much though............................

Heating up my wort whilst taking a sample SG reading from the mashtun into a one litre jug. At same time sterilising other brew equipment with a mixture of betadine and water whilst also using a similar one litre jug. You quessed it - steriliser solution into the kettle!!!

 

[mika]

A boy from the bush ?!
Must be a reasonable time between being able to get hold of ingredients, Chatty ?

 

[AngelTearsOnMyTongue]

I wish i could find a funny side to the following but I cant. I almost started another thread but it most definitely belongs here.

Following on from the website attack recently, i had been experiencing all sorts of problems as a spy program "Spysheriff" got downloaded onto my PC.

After faffing about trying to rid my PC of the offender, I finally took the plunge and decided to start anew.

I backed up all my personal files, my emails etc etc etc onto our external hard drive.

I Deleted all partitions and formatted.

All was going well until I went to retieve my antivirus, Antispyware, antiadware exe's which I had saved in a file. I clicked on the backup file and recieved the message something equivelant to "What backup file".

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.

Now this was very devesatating. Being in IT, one is supposed to backup regularly, but as they say, a plumbers pipes always leak.

My last backup was 5 Months ago.

Apart from all the photos and documents which really makes me sad.........The thing that made me shed a tear is that I lost a beautiful excel file I had set up which was a database of all my brews.

There were about a dozen detailed records in it (From start of this year) and they included all my ingredients, weights, how I handled the additions. Any minor details of how I slightly alterered the brew or the recipe. All my SG readings.......


WAAAAHHH HAAAA HAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

NOW I REALLY WANT TO HEADBUTT WHOEVER IT WAS IN BELGIUM WHO CAUSED ME ALL MY HASSELS. FREAKIN HACKERS!!!!!

Moral of the story: Dont assume a backup has worked.....CHECK IT OUT!!

Very sad

ATOMT

 

[Stuster]

Oh no. What a bugger. Photos and beer records. I'll help you with the hackers if you need it. :angry:

Good moral too. I'm off to check out my backups. :unsure:

 

[colinw]

I haven't ever had an all-out disaster, but over the years have had a few mistakes where were variously funny, inconvenient and very painful.

- Getting my wife to drop me at my mate Adrian's place for a brew session (we alternate brewing at each other place). Had a nagging feeling I'd forgotten something but couldn't put my finger on it. Became obvious when we tried to start - I'd left the grain mill at home.

- bumping around in the downstairs bathroom looking for something. Didn't bother putting the light on - I know my way around. Bump, crash and a bottle of hefeweizen smashes on the tiled floor. I didn't realise I had a bloody great hole in my foot until I nearly slipped on the steps going upstairs, then my wife got up me for tracking blood into the house. And that was a really nice hefeweizen that I destroyed a bottle of.

- The usual "left the tap open" snafu.

- The over tightened the tap resulting in a buckled O-ring trick. Realised when I noticed that my ferment was smelling extra beery, and noticed the pool of beer slowly spreading around the base of the fermenter. Had to quickly sanitise another fermenter and dump the beer in. Lost about 4 litres I think.

- Snapping a mercury thermometer into my mini-mash tun (styrofoam cooler). Was prodding around and noticed I had hot & cold spots. Being a complete bozo instead of taking the thermometer out and stirring with a spoon, I tried to stir it with the thermometer. End result, one contaminated mash had to be dumped.

- Carefully draining the fermented "beer" off a yeast starter of WLP570 Belgian Golden Ale. Accidentally dropped the starter bottle (coke bottle) into the sink, to watch 80% of my yeast slurry go down the drain.

- Stirring the manifold connection off, resulting in the mash having to be dumped into another container so we could re-connect.

cheers,
Colin

 

[Finite]

LOL that termometer one is a gem colin

Ive got another to add now.

Just yesterday I was bottling my lager, all was going fine, I was using one of those bottling friend things.. It was always been great and this time when I went to take the bottle out it didnt stop....the bottle kept filling up, beer folowing everywhere out of the top. I took to bottle away to find the valve floating in my king brown and beer flowing at a rapid rate onto the ground.

I quickly stuck my thumb over the end and spent the next 20 mins fishing the valve out of the neck, I had to top up the bottle with boiled water to get the valve to float to the surface. For a while there It deadset looked like one of those beer bongs with the beer flowing out of the tube, accept in sted of a funnel it was attacked to a 20L bucket .

BTW...about 15 bottles later the bloody thing came of again!! so I checked the valve was on properly before I filled each bottle after that. I think the pressure of the fluid pushing of the vavle when it turned off was firing the end off.

Might have to do some repairs on it before the next bottling session. Either that or I will buy a new one.

 

[bindi]

AngleTearsOnMyTongue soory to hear

NOW I REALLY WANT TO HEADBUTT WHOEVER IT WAS IN BELGIUM WHO CAUSED ME ALL MY HASSELS. FREAKIN HACKERS!!!!!

Moral of the story: Dont assume a backup has worked.....CHECK IT OUT!!

I can't be trusted to do back ups so I have a program [FullSync] that backs everthing up to an external hard drive every 24 hours [or as often as I want], after reading your post I did it again I know SFA about IT stuff.
I also send all my done recipes to Screwtop as a back up he knows about these evil things of which I know 'diddly squat'.

 

[Zizzle]

Moral of the story: Dont assume a backup has worked.....CHECK IT OUT!!

Commiserations, but you know all us non-windoze users have to laugh when we hear stories about the three R's forced on you by Billy (Reboot, reinstall, reformat).

Moral of the story: get a real OS.

BTW: rsync rocks for backups

 

[stephen]

LOL that termometer one is a gem colin

Ive got another to add now.

Just yesterday I was bottling my lager, all was going fine, I was using one of those bottling friend things.. It was always been great and this time when I went to take the bottle out it didnt stop....the bottle kept filling up, beer folowing everywhere out of the top. I took to bottle away to find the valve floating in my king brown and beer flowing at a rapid rate onto the ground.

I quickly stuck my thumb over the end and spent the next 20 mins fishing the valve out of the neck, I had to top up the bottle with boiled water to get the valve to float to the surface. For a while there It deadset looked like one of those beer bongs with the beer flowing out of the tube, accept in sted of a funnel it was attacked to a 20L bucket .

BTW...about 15 bottles later the bloody thing came of again!! so I checked the valve was on properly before I filled each bottle after that. I think the pressure of the fluid pushing of the vavle when it turned off was firing the end off.

Might have to do some repairs on it before the next bottling session. Either that or I will buy a new one.

Finite

Just buy another bottler. I had the same problem with one and, no matter how hard I assembled it etc, it would regularly fall apart at the worst possible moment. They are cheap!!!

Steve

 

[Finite]

LOL that termometer one is a gem colin

Ive got another to add now.

Just yesterday I was bottling my lager, all was going fine, I was using one of those bottling friend things.. It was always been great and this time when I went to take the bottle out it didnt stop....the bottle kept filling up, beer folowing everywhere out of the top. I took to bottle away to find the valve floating in my king brown and beer flowing at a rapid rate onto the ground.

I quickly stuck my thumb over the end and spent the next 20 mins fishing the valve out of the neck, I had to top up the bottle with boiled water to get the valve to float to the surface. For a while there It deadset looked like one of those beer bongs with the beer flowing out of the tube, accept in sted of a funnel it was attacked to a 20L bucket .

BTW...about 15 bottles later the bloody thing came of again!! so I checked the valve was on properly before I filled each bottle after that. I think the pressure of the fluid pushing of the vavle when it turned off was firing the end off.

Might have to do some repairs on it before the next bottling session. Either that or I will buy a new one.

Finite

Just buy another bottler. I had the same problem with one and, no matter how hard I assembled it etc, it would regularly fall apart at the worst possible moment. They are cheap!!!

Steve

Yeah I will buy a new one tomorrow when I grab some shopping stephen thanks for the reply. Do you remember where you got yours? there is a bigW and Kmart right near where I got shopping so Ill look there b4 driving out to the HB store

 

[Mothballs]

I have had the usual leakage/spillage losses over the years. Some small and some not so small but my worst balls up was on my very first brew and was similar to the one Colinw had . I was a naive 17 year old and wanted to make cheap piss. So using a starter kit from Coles I got cracking. On reading the instructions very briefly I picked up that the starting temp was very important. So following the instructions I added 4.5lt boiling water to my fermenter and added the can of goo and good old white sugar. After mixing this I thought I had better check the temp of the liquid so I grabbed the thermometer hanging on the wall of my Mum's kitchen and without thinking plunged it into the hot liquid. Unfortunately the thermometer was a mercury type which only went up to 50 deg. So consequently the thermometer busted and the mercury dropped to the bottom of the fermenter . This left me in a state of great distress and after an extended bout of swearing and cursing at my own stupidity I decided on a course of action to salvage the brew. The mercury was sitting on the bottom of the fermenter so I poured the majority of the wort into another bucket and then tried to get all the mercury out of the bottom of the fermenter. This is a task easier said than done. But after another bout of swearing and cursing I got it all out. Well all the visible traces anyway . I cleaned the fermenter out and poured the wort back in and and topped up with cold water and added the yeast. The rest of the process went as smoothly and as quickly as can be expected in typical Qld December temps and the resulting beer like liquid was bottled and consumed. Needless to say my second batch was a huge improvement and 100% mercury free :lol: .

Cheers
Mothballs

 

[Doogiechap]

Mothballs that's a scary one ! I'd be getting a couple of tests done to see how much made it into your system !
I remember pouring it through my fingers in Year 10 Science :blink:
No offence but it does make me think of 'The Castle's' Darryl Kerrighan though with his "so what do you know about lead ?"


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[DrewCarey82]

Dont know if this is a balls up more unlucky.

Was happily bottling away a brew about 6 months ago and then all of a sudden the bottom part of the little bottler fell off!

It absolutely pissed it, and being in a state of disarray it took me about 10 seconds to switch the damn tap off, all over the damn tiles for about a 2X2 radius, being sticky shit that wort is, it took me about half an hour of hard mopping and scrubbing to get it up.

- Personal balls up, forgetting to prime a brew after entirely finished bottling, lucky I have a bench top capper, but still wasnt to pleasing.

- Few times forget to add hop bag after adding yeast+sealing+adding airlock.

 

[Steve]

Drew - grab yourself a $1.50 bucket from Bunnings and put that under your little bottler....saved me a few times when it stayed open.
Cheers
Steve

 

[DrewCarey82]

Already done bro, I did have a container underneath but it burst out like a bloody high pressure hose and in my angsts knocked over the damn thing!

 

[Steve]

:lol: it sure gets the heart going doesnt it!