Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Brewing Beer: What mistakes have you made?

This post is inspired by Eli's most recent post over at The Four Eyed Beer Geek. I for one appreciate his situation. It really captures how I have felt when homebrewing, uncertain, pensive, hesitant and just plain frustrated. Not to worry I think Eli's first batch will be just fine. Anybody have some advice for him? We all make mistakes, right? Charlie Papazian said it best, "Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew." That statement drives to the heart of what homebrewing is all about, having fun. Face it if we worried about every step and what could go wrong, we probably wouldn't start homebrewing in the first place. Hey homebrewers out there, what mistakes have you made? Click here and tell us all about it.

4 comments:

Nate said...

For my first batch of brew this year (Franziskaner Hefeweizen clone), I either didn't get enough aeration, or I had an infection when the airlock blew off the primary (twice!). Tasted a bottle of the beer tonight (after one week of bottle carbonation) and found it to be quite buttery! Not good in a Hefeweizen, unfortunately.

Eli said...

Thanks for the vote of confidence!

Adam said...

Nate, I would be interested to know how it tastes after being in the bottle for a few weeks. Is it getting any better?

Buttery eh...could it be...

http://beerme.com/diacetyl.shtml

Adam said...

Eli, you bet :-)

Did I ever tell you about the time I forgot to put priming sugar in my barleywine during bottling?

Well, due to the level of residual sugars it didn't matter. In fact it is perfectly carbonated now :-)

Oh yeah and the the two times I forgot to taste my malt extract before throwing it in and ruining the whole batch. Sheesh...