Turning Stuff Ups Into Great Beer

[dr K]

There's the old adage that life's too short to drink shit beer, but then again, when you spend 5 hours on a brew day and further hours designing a recipe, putting together a yeast starter, racking, sanitising kegs, etc. etc. there's always motivation

To ensure that your equipment is sanitised, your racking not introducing oxygen or worse, your starter healthy, your recipe sensible and your five brewing hours not wasted.
Of course to many this argument may be quite contra, for do not many feel that the largest volumes of shit beer are produced by "mega-brewers" who despite the 'simplicity' of their beers probably do sanitise, pay attention to racking, use sensible if simple recipes bean countingly start their beers from single cells...

K

 

[benno1973]

To ensure that your equipment is sanitised, your racking not introducing oxygen or worse, your starter healthy, your recipe sensible and your five brewing hours not wasted.

That motivation goes without saying, and therefore wasn't said. Despite best efforts though, we are homebrewers and work within the confines of our equipment and resources. Not everything works out perfectly every time, and this thread is about exactly that.

 

[manticle]

If a beer's really shit, I just tip it and ask myself why it happened. There's usually a lesson to learn, or relearn, from the experience.

Through experience of "shit" (ie not good enough) beers I've learned that different categories of shit can be dealt with in different ways. Experience in knowing why a particular beer is shit helps heaps towards knowing how to then make it taste better. The more shit batches you brew and learn how to make them not shit, the better brewer you'll be.

It's all about the vibe, really.

I can safely say I agree with the above.