How Many Bad Brews Have You Made?

[colonel]

Mate, after 17 years, and 322 brews (K&K and partials), I'd guess I've had a dozen crap beers.

Only one was "undrinkable", and I assume it had a bug in it.

The others were a mixture of:

Flat... mix with a fizzy one.
Fizzy(overcarbed)... mix with a flat one.
Twangy...... wait a couple of years, it's amazing how time can heal!

I now think temperature control (or, lack of it) was the problem with most of the "duds".

Having said that, tomorrow I'm having my first go at AG (yes, I know I'm a bit slow), so who knows what will happen.

Stick with it.

Cheers

 

[bevdawg]

It will most likely fix your "bitterness issues" but could lead to others. The whole idea behind no chilling is not to chill at all. You run hot wort straight into the cube, squeeze out as much air as possible and cap, then leave to cool naturally.
The other method is to chill right down to pitching temp, run the wort into the fermenter and pitch your yeast.
What you are proposing to do is a seldom used "sorta-kinda half-arsed chill" method. It's the heat that kills off the nasties in the remaining air inside your cube, so why would you chill it down to below effective heat, but not low enough to pitch?

I kinda (foolishly) was thinking wort at 70-80c is still very hot and in a cube with hardly any air would keep nasties at bay... but now thinking not the case> problem I've had in the past with the immersion chiller is it really only gets temps down to around 35, and thats with a lot of stirring, which means the kettle is open and crap can get in.... so figuring it's better to take 20c off with the kettle covered (this is where is gets to without stirring) and then chuck in the well sanitised cube to chill the rest of the way. Maybe the immersion chiller was not the best investment! I think I might go no chill, easier and less risky...

 

[DUANNE]

I also recall buying a new set of scales that went up in .01g increments from evilbay...

Turned it on, And i now realise the measurement GN, is NOT grams Reading up, it is a measurement of FORCE... That cant be right?

Meh, very bland... Scales now being used correctly, Perfect

grains are a weight measure that are used in home reloading ammunition, for this you need a very accurate measurement otherwise the gun can go bang in ways it was never intended to.from a quick look at google a gram is roughly 15.4 grains.

 

[Sunshine_Brewer]

Jeez, I only just surpassed the 50 all grain mark and have had all of the following issues. Not in any particular order.

acetaldehyde (green apple) Bo Pils
Diacetyl (Butter) Pilsner, Rice Lager and Bo Pils
Lacto (Sour) Dunkelweizen
Dodgy Notto yeast = sour
weird cherry esters from a repitch of 3787
vomit funk ester thing from pitching whole 2L starter of WY2487 into Pilsner
yeast stalling due to extreme cold snaps, sweet beer.

Probably half of the above could be considered bad but I necked the lot :icon_drunk:

 

[DUANNE]

oh and yes i have had some rotten beers, mainly when kit and kiloing and fermenting as per kit instructions. also had some ordinary beers when trying to create my own recipes and just going crazy on hops for the sake of it.

 

[Newbee(r)]

In 4 years, mainly kits and partials til this year, 2 stuck ferments - that were bottled in hope but drank maybe 30% before they were unmanageable - and 2 undrinkables - both of these since I started AG. Problem - Recipe.

Specific problem - Pacific Gem hops. Whomever the dark imp is who came up with this hop, it is a nasty, dominating SOB and they deserve to be flogged accordingly. Or experimented on with a car battery and jumper leads. Yes, that bad. Killed my White Rabbit Copy (poured away 2 cases) and a subsequent american amber ale (holding on in feint hope but know they are following the bloody rabbit).

Otherwise, touch wood, all good!! I am pretty careful with sanitation, and I think that has played a big part in keeping a good innings. Learnt about aeration and temperature the hard way (stuck ferments).

Copying commercial brews I like (notwithstanding initial aforementioned experiments) has landed me in pretty safe territory since going AG to start exploring beers to my palate a bit more carefully.

 

[dabre4]

How many beers have I made? Not enough! I am in an infinite loop where I make more recipes than I can brew. It's an ever growing list. After 30 ish brews never had an infection, a few beers that didn't turn out as planned, but nothing undrinkable.

 

[C-MOR]

In a moment genius in 2002 i decided to try the 'clean tea-towel' method of open fermentation included in coopers instructions. It just so happened that that particular brew was left for an extended primary ferment of 3 weeks.
I tried really hard, but only managed to drink a couple of litres.
Its the only one id call BAD as opposed to the dozen or so id call very average.

 

[pimpsqueak]

I kinda (foolishly) was thinking wort at 70-80c is still very hot and in a cube with hardly any air would keep nasties at bay... but now thinking not the case> problem I've had in the past with the immersion chiller is it really only gets temps down to around 35, and thats with a lot of stirring, which means the kettle is open and crap can get in.... so figuring it's better to take 20c off with the kettle covered (this is where is gets to without stirring) and then chuck in the well sanitised cube to chill the rest of the way. Maybe the immersion chiller was not the best investment! I think I might go no chill, easier and less risky...

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be sticking my hand into a kettle of wort @ 70-80 degrees. It is certainly hot, just not as hot (and effective) as it could be.

I use an immersion chiller and I can get my wort down to 23 deg at the moment. What temp is your tap water out of interest? Mine is 16-18 degrees.

My chiller is 6m of 1/2 copper tube that I kinda "macramed" by hand into shape. After the wort is down to 60 deg or so, I place the chiller at the edge of the kettle and then I gently whirlpool the wort so it passes through the coils of the chiller.

 

[Malted]

I made a wheat beer that sucked arse.
I half filled a large container with water and no-rinse sanitiser in a strong batch to use as the vessel for the blowoff tube as the yeast had proved to be vigorous previously and I had the ferementer filled quite a bit. All went well until I went to crash chill it for a few days. I forgot to remove the blow off tube from the strong no-rinse solution... As it cooled the fermenter sucked up about 1 1/2 litres of the no rinse into the brew. I carbed it up in a keg 'just to see' but it's flavour had been totally murdered. It got tipped on the lawn...

 

[mh971]

I reckon I'm running at about 50/50

I have made Tonys LCBA recipe quite few times now, and even when I have been ready to write it off before it's even in fermenter it always turns out somewhere between ok and great. This recipe is tough, you can pretty much **** every step up and still get very drinkable beer.

On the other hand I've tried some other recipes, hit every target spot on and still ended up choking my way through 20 odd litres of it not knowing what went wrong.

I'd recommend to pick your recipe ( a light coloured ale and preferably one with a commercial or reliable control you can check against), then stick with it so you can taste your mistakes and correct them. Farting about with different grain and hop bills mixed with different yeast all the time has slowed me down by a year I reckon. When you make the same recipe as a standard you can see/taste the intentional changes/unwanted mistakes you make.

Imagine trying to learn guitar by playing a different song every practice session, it doesn't work, repetition is the key. Once you get few things perfect then you can move on. ( I wish I could practice what I just preached though).

I got cocky and started to mess up, I should have kept plodding. Some people can pull it off, not me.

 

[Hatchy]

I had many shockers over 12 years of off & on brewing. Partly due to laziness but more due to terrible advice, mainly from brewcraft.

Since I've been on AHB I've brewed a couple of batches which at the time I thought were too hoppy, now I'm starting to think that they had the right amount of hops but not enough grain.

I've never I'm yet to tip a batch although some have been less enjoyable than others.

 

[Muggus]

Retrospectively, after 8 years and 166 or so batches, i'd say at least 10% of them were "not good" in any way shape or form.
Probably another 10-20% I was not particularly happy with for whatever reason.
Things have gotten better recently of course, and I reckon that number would probably be around 50% for brews I wasn't too happy with if I tried some of those old kit 'n kilo beers.

 

[Dave70]

One that springs to mind was a under attenuated - or so I thought at the time - ESB that was so cloyingly sweet it was simply undrinkable.
Decimal points are good things to pay attention to when ordering crystal malt.

.150

1.50..