Craziest Home Brewing Story
I was talking to a business associate this morning about brewing...he told me a story about his father who was an avid brewer. His father was using a classic method for the primary fermentation of using a bucket, and placing a towel over the top of the bucket to keep stuff out.
Well one day his cat was walking around the basement and decided to jump on what was apparently a hard surface - only to find that it was a towel covering an open bucket filled with fermenting beer.
Let your imagination do the work here - a cat in a bucket of beer...
What's your craziest home brewing story?
Yes and think it is the craziest story for cat too !
but what happened after that with beer and cat both?
Nothing has gone horribly wrong in my personal experience.
But once my brother-in-law was helping my father-in-law bottle wine. His siphoning technique wasn't very good and he swallowed enough wine to stay away from it for years to come.
I wasn't there and I'm not sure if he was also drinking it by the glass or not.
Yeah that's not a good idea to have it in too much quantity !
But how much time takes recovering from it
We bought a new flat-top stove and I couldn't get it hot enough to bring 3 gallons of wort to a boil. So I took the pot outside and used the side burner on my gas grill. It worked great and I've been brewing outside ever since. The only problem is the occasional leaf that falls into the brew pot.
I forgot about this one: Before I got into "real" homebrewing, I acquired a "brew in a bag" kit. I had the bag, which had a spigot in it, down in the basement fermenting away when our curious 2-year-old daughter came upon it. Needless to say, the next time I checked the bag, there was beer all over the floor. So I never got to see if you could actually make beer in a bag.
Brew in a bag? I've never heard of that...
Re: brew in a bag. I've never seen it before or since. I couldn't find replacement ingredients for it so I pitched it and moved on.
Well, I'm not so sure how crazy it is, but I've heard several stories of bottles exploding due to adding to much priming sugar. Thankfully, it hasn't happened to me.
Well, there was the time (first time I brewed at home, I think) a friend told me to put the lid on the pot to get the wort boiling.
Bad, bad, bad idea.
We started talking and drinking beer, and before we knew it, that wort was boiling right over.
What a mess.
DaveSlash
Due to space constraints my primary sits in my room. Now I'm to the cleanest person so the one time that I had a blow off (no blow off tube of course) it got stuff all over my dirty clothes that were sitting on the floor. It was quite the mess.
Re: Beer in a bag.
I assume beer in a bag is not unlike the Mr. Beer products advertised on these very pages. I have a friend who's tried Mr. Beer and has yet to get it right. I was no help to him since my one and only self-contained effort was a wash, a floor wash.
my father-in-law told a story about when he was young
it seems his dad brewed beer and some times the bottles would break in the closet where his dad put them after capping the bottles
so "mutt" my father-in-law would crawl under the house and reach up in the hole that his dad had in the closet floor in case some of the bottles broke and take the brokin bottle out and pour about half of what was left in a jar and put the bottle back up the hole in the closet
then take the jar to the barn and drink it
he said that way his dad didn't know the kids where taking his beer
all was working great untill his sister took a broken bottle out and didn't put it back with some in it and ol dad caught on lol
well no more beer for the kids
this was in the late 20's early 30's
I was teaching a friend how to brew using and oatmill stout recipe. This was an extract brew, and after boiling the oatmill with the wort, we had to get it out. My friend was supposed to hold the strainer while i poured the wort through into the bucket.
Of course, he dropped the strainer into the bucket. Before I could do anything, he dunked both hands into the bucket to pull the strainer out. Half of the oatmill was left in the bucket. We just let it for from there.
A week later, we started to bottle. All the oatmill had coagulated in the bottom of the fermenter, and we basically lost half the batch. We had put in enough corn sugar for a full 5 gallons, so each of the bottles was a wee bit over carbonated. Luckily, we didn't have any bombs going off. The stout actually ended up being pretty good, but this was the last time I invited my friend over for brewing! He was only allowed to drink the beer after this.
Well, I dare say I have one after my brewing session last night! 
So my brew-buddy Dave and I were making our first partial mash: an Oatmeal Stout! Things were going well, until Dave forgot to heat the mash up to 170 degrees for the second protein rest (ten minute rest) before putting it in the beverage cooler we were using as a mash tun. Looked kinda like this:
So his brilliant plan: Just add a gallon of 190 degree water, and it should raise the temperature of the mash to about where we need it! So, he starts heating up the water.
He gets the water to the desired temperature, and pours it into the cooler. All is well for about a minute, then we suddenly start hearing many mysterious small cracking noises...turns out the cooler wasn't able to withstand the sudden temperature change 
Yeah, it's now got a ring of about 2" long hairline cracks halfway up the inside 
Well, we had a short & serious discussion about wether or not to keep the beer...and eventually we decided to see if the wort smelled/tasted like plastic before throwing it out. As luck would have it, the wort tasted & smelled fine, so we're going to see what happens!
Wish us luck 
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