Homebrewing Horror Stories

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I made a Framboise (a raspberry lambic) once that, I guess because of the lambic yeasts, decided it never wanted to stop fermenting. One of the by-products of fermentation is CO[sub]2[/sub]. Adding more and more CO[sub]2[/sub] to a capped bottle leads, eventually, to too much pressure. The bottles began exploding. Some actually exploded with enough force to embedd glass in the shower curtain that was concealing the batch in the un-used second bath.

That Lambic, by the way, won a second-place ribbon in a competition when it was about one year old. It was tasty but dangerous.

Another horror story: actually more of a melodrama and almost a tragedy.

Brewing day was greeted by an unexpected storm, so I was forced from my normal brewing area on the back deck to the somewhat smaller, though covered, front porch. The cramped area meant that I had to move things around more than normal because I couldn’t set up everything at once.

I was making a Hefeweizen. About halfway through the mash, I was rearranging stuff and bumped the spigot on the bottom of the mash tun, causing it to leak - unnoticed. After losing a couple of quarts of sweet liquor, I became aware of the problem. I cursed profusely and nearly wept in sorrow.

Undaunted - okay I was daunted but unyielding - I added water and finished brewing. I called the brew Mitten Weizen because it actually mashed out with an OG higher than a “light” weiss but less than a typical weizen. It was a satisfying end to a troubling situation.

I call my homebrewery “Branded Hand Brewery” because of my penchant of burning my hand at least once every time I brew.

Have you got any tales of woe to tell?

2

Two words:

Homebrewed Malibu

Back in the '80s I was making a batch of lager, and my then girlfriend bought a Malibu kit and asked me to make her some. Imagine a bright blue, bitter, bitter ale that tasted of washing-up liquid.

The horror. The horror.

3

How about mind numbingly stupid?

Moving a glass carboy out of a sink in bare feet. The carboy then slips landing on, no not my toes, the second carboy underneath smashing both and spilling wort all over the floor and trapping me in a beery smelling basement unable to move due to glass everywhere.

I’m MUCH better now. Of course how could I not be?

Oh and I did a smoke beer that could’ve brought the forest service around I put so much liquid smoke in it.

4

My mom decided to make cranberry coolers in empty plastic pop bottles.

She made them, and let them ferment for a while, and then after the alloted time, she went to go try one to see if it was drinkable.
the minute she picked it up it started to fizz, and exploded. And I mean EXPLODED… it was a big room, maybe 20 feet by 15, and there wasn’t one inch of the room that wasn’t covered.
That was half a year ago… we haven’t touched them since. Just left them there. Don’t want to have to spend a whole day scrubbing everything down again…

5

I had a carboy of somewhat hot Belgian ale a few years back. My mind had obviously taken a break…because I spotted a snow bank outside…

I weep now even thinking about it.

6

  1. Mr. Butrscotch, when he was 13, decided with a friend to build a still in an abandoned farmhouse. They were not trying to produce a beverage that had any redeeming features other than alcoholic content, certainly nothing as class as a name. However, they left it alone to run, and the next day came back to find chunks of the still embedded in the walls of the farmhouse. After that, they watched it a little more closely for some strange reason.

  2. When I was in college, some dorm-mates produced a batch of homemade beer. Being a willing drinker, I was happy to drink not only my allotment of two bottles but another friend’s allotment as well.

Never did find out what they put in that stuff, but we had to drink it fast before the bottles started exploding. But it’s safe to say that I have never in my life experienced such a hangover. My Og. The pain.

7

Last time I made homebrewed beer, I was woken one night by three loud bangs coming from the spare bedroom. Turns out the pressure had been building up in the carboys, and the resulting explosions caused the rubber bungs to pop out and bounce off the ceiling. When I walked into the room there was a nice big pool of beer and froth soaking into the carpet, and three perfectly round dents in the ceiling.

I’ve also dabbled in making root beer at home, from a kit I purchased online and had shipped over to the UK. This one used yeast to provide carbonation, but unfortunately it worked a lot more quickly than I predicted. The plastic bottles cracked under the pressure, spraying several litres of sticky root beer all over the inside of my bathroom cupboard and the towels within.

Never again, at least until I move somewhere with a garage.

8

We made a peach mead one time, wherein I used about 5 lbs. of fresh peaches. I thought there was plenty of room left over inside the carboy for the head of foam that usually accumulates on top of the fermenting brew - it was only about 2/3 full.

I was wrong.

We woke up the next morning to this weird smell - a mixture of peaches and a yeasty/bready aroma with a hint of stale sugar to it.

The fermenting peaches had gone insane - the foam had filled up the rest of the space in the carboy, pushed its way up through the airlock, spilled down the side of the carboy and was oozing across the floor of the kitchen. I am really glad we didn’t have dogs back then.

9

mmmmmmmm… Homebrew. Nice, full-bodied Homebrew. mmmmmmmm… Huh? whaddya mean, that’s not what we’re talkin’ about. I want some Homebrew NOW!

10

I usually use a plastic carboy, the kind 5 gallons of water comes in. I did a dry hopping once with plugs, the next morning it was plugged up and the carboy had swollen up. I unthinkingly grabbed the airlock, and that triggered a gyerser all over the bathroom.

11

Let’s get to work on that swampbeer shall we?

12

Damn. Messed up my flirting. Jeez.

Cue cheesy porn music again …
Let’s get to work on that swampbrew shall we?

13

I was living in Ottawa as a poor co-op student with a roommate who was reluctant to invest in more than one plate, knife and fork…or a mop (just to set the stage). We had made some kit wine purely for the economics of it, and some beer at a u-brew (tasted so many during the bottling that we had to call a cab) and then decided that the thing we wanted to do was make mead. Used the Antipodal recipe from George Papazian’s first book if you are curious.

Well, we had no large pot. No nothing in fact except a cast iron fry pan and a small wok. We decided to split the recipe in thirds (everything - water, honey, herbs etc) and cook it batchwise in the wok (hey, a couple of engineering students…batchwise processing is quite common in the literature after all). Each of three times - boiled over into a sticky mess. Then of course we needed to transfer it to the carboy. From a hot wok. With no funnel. We finally had the bright idea to cut the bottom off a plastic Heinz Ketchup bottle and use that, but we were in such a rush to transfer the first bunch that I don’t think we washed it very carefully. I had to hold the opposite corners of the rectangular “mouth” of our new funnel with forks, in order to spread it open enough, and we had to knock on the apartment next door to get some forks! I was afraid to burn my arms so we put a bunch of towels and t-shirts on my wrists. (I need to point out that we were dead sober at the time!)

Well. Towels soaked with hot wort. Burned wrists (not serious but annoying). Sticky icky all over the kitchen. Dried ketchup bits in the fermentor. Early evidence that the yeast packet was dead (it did not foam the starter as it was supposed to). In short, carnage.

To our astonishment, fermentation proceeded apace, and we did not blow the carboy lock all over the linen closet either. Racking went smoothly although I suspect my roommate’s elderly transfer hose had been used to siphon gasoline at at least one point during the term. We bottled in 750mL glass pop bottles (remember those?) which were sterilized in bleach water in a (not particularly clean) bathtub. Aged it for 4 weeks before we cracked the first one.

And it was good. I mean, in a relatively absolute sense. We carefully hoarded and hid our personal stash. Visitors would sneak around to snarf some or beg for tastes. Literally “c’mon, man, just a glass, just one glass!” I gave a bottle to my boss the wine snot (750 mL glass diet coke bottle with a plastic u-brew twist cap marked with a star in grease pencil (my personal ID glyph)) more or less as a joke, saying “Do not spill on finished wood or plastic. Do not operate heavy machinery” and she LOVED it, and wanted to know where she could get more.

sigh damn that was good stuff. I have tried the same recipe 4 times in the intervening 10 years, under much more carefully controlled and responsible conditions, and have never even come close. I keep trying to get my old roommate to come visit from Calgary with a ketchup bottle, but he’s too busy for me these days…

14

Please, please can I have your Framboise recipe??

I am drinking a homebrew right now. Our “James Brown-Eye Ale” The first time we tried it, it was flat as a pancake.

Some of our, let’s say “learning experiences” were:

Using a straining bag and not a small screen at the end of a funnel. I swear I got carpal tunnel after constantly swishing a spoon (sanitized, of course) about a 3x3 inch screen with a hot porter mash. Took so much time and energy we had to switch.

Dog hair rises to the top and can be easily skimmed.

Heating pads applied to the side really help if your tempature dips. (I often wondered what the neighbors thought when they drove by the kitchen window and saw the “old beer pail” getting muscle relief on the kitchen table.

Goat Scrotum Porter (named Magilla Gorilla Beer by us) could have been classified as hooch or moonshine. I think it was almost 7 percent. We learned our lesson after a very roucous 4th of July party.

Finally, I also learned that I can bottle beer all by myself. I never did it before, but the hub was busy and I gave it a go. I’m enjoying one right now.

And I also like Mountain Home Brew out of Kirkland, Wa. They are some of the nicest people. I am a novice and they are so helpful and patient. They have good recipes as well.

Happy Brewing!

15

I was gifted with a 6 foot piece of a columnlike cactus when a local greenhouse closed down. Chopped the top 8" off and planted it, and tried making wine out of the rest. After cutting and mashing the cactus in a blender, I added a camden tablet, a bit of sugar, and later yeast. It fermented nicely, and after ~a week I filtered the plant residue off leaving a pale green liquor. Come bottling time, the material had a light slightly planty flavor, however it had also gotten viscous enough so that once a bit of it was tilted out of a glass, the rest was dragged along in long alcoholic ropes. -Never did bottle the stuff, or try the experiment again !

16

Wow. Someone else brewed the goat’s scrotum :slight_smile: Except we couldn’t find spruce essence so we used cardemom instead and called it the goat scrotum’s bastard…

One March we decided to brew stout for St. Paddy’s. We had heard that Guinness uses soured wort to give it that special taste. So we brewed a batch of stout, and left two pints out on the counter when we bottled the rest. Then a week later, the counter-stout was smelling good and ripe, so we brewed a different stout, boiled the living heck out of the soured stuff and threw it in. Surprisingly, this second batch was really good. At least for the first three weeks after we bottled it. Then it started being not so good. It was a sad day when we decided it was really far too sour to drink, and dumped 20 pints of it down the sink :frowning:

17

Well. When I was a teenager, I found a recipe for ginger beer.

Made it, bottled it, let it sit… found out that I loathe ginger. Mary Ann is cool though.

18

One of my first batches. A stuck fermentation, although I didn’t know it at the time. I thought the final gravity reading was a little high but, what did I know? I’m amazed that none of the bottles exploded. After about a month of conditioning, I put a couple of bottles in the 'fridge. When they were cold, I opened one over the sink. (The only smart thing I did.) About 1/3 to 1/2 foamed out into the sink. Not an explosive release, but a constatnt foam, foam, foam. I found it imposible to pour it into a glass as a liquid. I had a glass of foam. After a VERY long wait, there was beer in the glass. It was terrible. Way too sweet, and the instant it touched my mouth, it turned to foam, foam, foam. Like most people, I like a little head :wink: but this was too much even for me!

19

I’ve never had any real homebrew disasters myself, but a friend of mine told me she was making homebrewed root beer. I told her to be very careful bottling it, because unlike real beer there is no alcohol to stun the yeast in the bottle and prevent too much pressure from building up. She insisted it was safe, and left a bottle for me as a present on my desk at work.

She left it two days before Christmas.

I was gone until after New Years.

Luckily, no one was there when it exploded. There was tiny shards of glass embedded in my computer monitor screen, and in the corkboard over my desk.

The expression on the IT guy’s face when I explained why I needed a new keyboard was priceless.

20

Had this happen twice. The spew hit the ceiling the second time, trub/yeast/hops all over the bathtub (started putting the newly fermenting carboy of beer in the bathtub to make cleanup easier if it blew its top)

Both were very tasty beers.