Mistakes we have made

Australia & New Zealand Homebrewing Forum

Help Support Australia & New Zealand Homebrewing Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Will2233

Well-Known Member
Joined
10/6/18
Messages
49
Reaction score
18
Location
Engadine
Hello fellow brewers,
Let me tell you of my tale of woe.
Recently I have not been able to achieve my numbers when brewing with my 30 L Robobrew. (40 plus brews)
Yesterday I adjusted my mill finer and when I was checking the crush thought "oh no, stuck sparge for sure".
It was a slowish sparge but not over long.
Finally hit my numbers OG was estimated in BS to be 1.045 I hit 1.047.
Very pleased with myself.

I even used my harvested BRY-97 from my last batch. (only the second time doing it) after 3 hours there was activity in my Fermentorsarus, before retiring for the night the yeast was working a treat.
I opened the fermenting fridge this morning to find this.... WTF....
I'm sure the eagle eyed among you have already spotted the "@#*&" mistake.
I have made , like all of us, mistakes. Some big some small, thats a part of the brewing life.

Besides me writing this to show every one what a goose I am, since this ferment is less than 24 hours old do you think I can just throw everything into a fermertor king junior and let it do its thing?
I want to brew again soon but I am limited to one large fermentor and 2 FKJ in the fridge and I don't want to wait until this 10 liters ferments out.
Any advice and any one else with tales of stupidity please feel free to follow up.
William
 

Attachments

  • brew.jpg
    brew.jpg
    73.5 KB · Views: 169
Hello fellow brewers,
Let me tell you of my tale of woe.
Recently I have not been able to achieve my numbers when brewing with my 30 L Robobrew. (40 plus brews)
Yesterday I adjusted my mill finer and when I was checking the crush thought "oh no, stuck sparge for sure".
It was a slowish sparge but not over long.
Finally hit my numbers OG was estimated in BS to be 1.045 I hit 1.047.
Very pleased with myself.

I even used my harvested BRY-97 from my last batch. (only the second time doing it) after 3 hours there was activity in my Fermentorsarus, before retiring for the night the yeast was working a treat.
I opened the fermenting fridge this morning to find this.... WTF....
I'm sure the eagle eyed among you have already spotted the "@#*&" mistake.
I have made , like all of us, mistakes. Some big some small, thats a part of the brewing life.

Besides me writing this to show every one what a goose I am, since this ferment is less than 24 hours old do you think I can just throw everything into a fermertor king junior and let it do its thing?
I want to brew again soon but I am limited to one large fermentor and 2 FKJ in the fridge and I don't want to wait until this 10 liters ferments out.
Any advice and any one else with tales of stupidity please feel free to follow up.
William
oh man that's a classic! Sorry for the loss but I had a little giggle. I double check when I put the spunder on cause I am terrified of that happening hahaha.

I wouldn't even transfer, I would just let it do it's thing to be honest. Nothing would have gotten in, think of it as a blow off tube without the bucket to catch it :D
 
I brew on a deck that is above the shed i ferment in. I pump the wort from the kettle down into the fermenter below. My best f**k up was commencing pumping down to fermenter, cleaning up and doing my thing upstairs, anyway above halfway through the batch i went down to turn the cooling unit on the fermenter on and there was about 50L of wort that had gone into the fermenter and straight out the butterfly valve that was open on the bottom. Managed to salvage another 60 or so litres and tilted the kettle to get all the volume i could. As it was a 6.5% ipa, i ended up watering it down to a 4.5% session ipa pre ferment so I only ended up with 1 keg less than i normally get.
 
I still don't believe I know what I'm doing most of the time....But way back in 2013 there was a fad for what was called at the time "10 minute IPAs", which basically meant all/most the hops went in at the ten minute mark. In my ignorance and inexperience at the time I thought it meant a 10 minute boil.

My post proclaiming how great 10 minute boils were for mid week brewing ended up in an epic 10 page - 4 year long thread, that went from my rookie error to some more experienced folks doing some experiments on short boil times, to a few heated posts and a bit of name calling....ah the good old days of AHB.

Here's a fun read if you're interested/could be bothered.

10 minute IPAs are good for school night brewing

but before you go down that wormhole let me be clear 10 MINUTES BOILS ARE A BAD IDEA
 
I still don't believe I know what I'm doing most of the time....But way back in 2013 there was a fad for what was called at the time "10 minute IPAs", which basically meant all/most the hops went in at the ten minute mark. In my ignorance and inexperience at the time I thought it meant a 10 minute boil.

My post proclaiming how great 10 minute boils were for mid week brewing ended up in an epic 10 page - 4 year long thread, that went from my rookie error to some more experienced folks doing some experiments on short boil times, to a few heated posts and a bit of name calling....ah the good old days of AHB.

Here's a fun read if you're interested/could be bothered.

10 minute IPAs are good for school night brewing

but before you go down that wormhole let me be clear 10 MINUTES BOILS ARE A BAD IDEA

It's one of the classics, up there with the Clocks and the Great Chinese Hop Bulk Buy.

FWIW, I still love my 10 minute boils after you told me it was actually ok! Thanks mate, you are a genius :)
 
Only a few brews back I mashed in on the Grainfather and went to put the top malt plate on to realise that the overflow pipe wasn’t there. First thought was i didn’t extend it but on closer inspection I hadn’t even put the grain basket in. Had to pick the whole thing up and pour it into a plastic fermenter, add the grain basket and tip it all back in to start/continue the mash.
 
Ferments under pressure, crash chills, closes butterfly valve at some stage .... kegs beer, sits fermzilla on bench, swears getting the lid off dumps lid into the sink, opens butterfly valve ..... oh crap!!!! ..... spends "some time" cleaning yeast etc off the roof, walls , face and holy jesus how did it get there? Thinks has done a good job of cleaning ... waits two weeks and finds all the bits he missed, nicely black on white ceiling ....
 
Ferments under pressure, crash chills, closes butterfly valve at some stage .... kegs beer, sits fermzilla on bench, swears getting the lid off dumps lid into the sink, opens butterfly valve ..... oh crap!!!! ..... spends "some time" cleaning yeast etc off the roof, walls , face and holy jesus how did it get there? Thinks has done a good job of cleaning ... waits two weeks and finds all the bits he missed, nicely black on white ceiling ....

Somewhat similar happened to me, with kegging i normally use the counterpressure method so i gassed my fermzilla to about 7psi, once all done i forgot to depressurise and took the retaining ring off and a loud pop and crash, the lid popped off and smacked into my shed roof.

I use the stainless carb caps so i was very lucky my face wasn't over it when it popped. o_O
 
I had to add some acid to lower ph of a Weizmann beer but missed that the strength was 10% instead of the 96% I used. The amount I put in made it way to acidic so thinking how to rescue it I added 150 g bicarbonate soda to reduce the ph of the boil. It erupted in a mountain of foam and emptied boiling wort all over the edge of the brewzilla 65
 
I had to add some acid to lower ph of a Weizmann beer but missed that the strength was 10% instead of the 96% I used. The amount I put in made it way to acidic so thinking how to rescue it I added 150 g bicarbonate soda to reduce the ph of the boil. It erupted in a mountain of foam and emptied boiling wart all over the edge of the brewziller 65
Sorry for laughing Hopasauraus. My mind immediately went to how little bicarb it takes in the Xmas pudding mix to get the hot ingredients to foam up, usually about 1 tsp. 150 g holey cow!
 
Back
Top