Brewing horror story

[john mills]

This might be a good thread to start to list our horror stories of the bad things that have happened.

Today I came home from work and discovered my space heater I've been using to heat my brewcloset to 67-69 degrees running continously. I'm not sure when it started running that way, but I knew the instant I opened the closet door thing were wrong. My max/min thermometer was currently reading 78, where max went to 94 degrees. My 8 day old carboy of wit that the heater was pointed at was bubbling ever so slowly and was hot to the touch. (I think/hope it was just degassing). My carboy of 7% wit the same age was bubbling faster (it should have been nearing completion of ferment, and I was wanting to increase it's temp anyway). The nightmare fir me is the 11 gallons of 2 1/2 day old American wheat. They're just busily bubbling away. I hope it's not just a bunch of headache juice now.

[Don]

"horror stories of the bad things"

This will be one of my regular post.
But, all too often my horror stories turn into something great.

[sirgiovanni]

My worst was the damned ice storm. It was a 4-day battle to keep the heat up in the house. My life consisted of looking for more blankets, splitting wood, and making propane runs. I think I might of even just held the conical while sobbing lightly a few times. It lived though and finished out.

[Dwayne_Delaney]

The week before last I was moving a glass 5 gal carboy of cider that was tasting great and ready to keg. To be safe, I was using a brewhauler sling. When I picked it up I noticed that the handles on the brewhauler weren't even. Apparently the straps had shifted from my last lift and weren't centered under the carboy. Before I could set it back down, the carboy slid out of the Brewhauler onto the concrete basement kitchen floor.

Thousands of shards of broken glass mixed with 5 gals. of really good cider and my tears all over the kitchen floor...... 'nuff said.

[john mills]

The breaking carboy brings back bad memories. I've got two incidents of 5 gallon carboys breaking.
The first, I'm still trying to recover from. I had an orange mead must set with 13# of honey. I was carrying the carboy back inside, with one hand on the neck, and the other hand underneath cradling the infant concoction . When while carrying the baby Huey carboy, time ticked very slowly. To the point of almost stop action. I could see the neck broke off cleanly in my right hand and the rest of the carboy tilting/tumbling to the carpeted floor below. Multiple thoughts of how to catch it ran through my head before it finally hit the floor in a sticky tsunami that flooded it's way in a 6 ft radius of ground zero impact. I ripped up the carpet with promises to my wife to put in slate flooring since it's the floor of our walk out basement...I still have to put the new flooring in.

Second is not quite a good of a story but equally a loss for me. While cleaning out a carboy, I noticed a flaw in the bottom of the carboy. I work with automotive glass, and can spot flaws fairly easily. It wasn't in my opinion anything that was going to be detrimental (or at the time I thought). So I decided to devote this carboy to the sour bug beers and let it rest for years to come basically untouched. I brewed a Flander's red, fermented wonderfully and had it aging for about 8 months. I thieved a sample to see how it was tasting. Three days later when I went to place another carboy in the brew closet. The Flander's red carboy was empty. The carboy looked as if it was cut all the way around where the bottom becomes the sides. This was not in the area where the initial flaw was detected. So I'm at a loss of what happened.

Lets all raise a pint in remembrance to our fallen carboys tonight!

[BM1]

Hay,here's one y'all might watch out for and it wasn't any flaw in the glass.I was, very hurriedly cleaning a 3 gal. carboy with a regular carboy brush.The carboy was one o those that has the ridges that looks like square panes around it.Thes ridges are on the inside also.While spinning that brush around on the inside,the wire frame popped against the glass after skipping over a ridge and knocked a chunk of glass accross the room.Lucky it didn't hit me in the face.Since then,I take my time cleaning carboys with ridges.