Frightening Tales Of Scary Beer
It’s Fermentation Friday again and it’s also Halloween for all of you keeping score at home. Rob and Des and Pfiff! are hosting this month and the theme this time around is truly scary. We were asked to bring out our homebrewing horror stories. I am hoping we will see some tales of exploding bottles or beers growing legs and running away. Unfortunately, I don’t have those stories…but here’s my scary story.
A young homebrewer (Let’s call him John) decided he had enough beer brewing experience (Let’s call him cocky) to brew up a batch of Nut Brown Ale. He rushed through the preparation, he rushed through the boil. He rushed through chilling his wort…he rushed through it all.
You see, to him, brewing beer was something he could take casually now. He didn’t have to take his time. He could just whip up a few ingredients on the stovetop and let it sit somewhere for a few weeks and create beer magic. He was just that good.
With his nose in the air and his chest swelling, he came home one day to pop open a bottle of his Nut Brown to find…that…it…tasted…HORSEY!
YES! The taste of Equus caballus in a bottle. Sweaty, leathery, gallop-y flavors slid down his palate. His face fell pale, his hands shook. “How COULD This HAPPEN?”, he asked allowed. He retraced his steps…realizing that he may have gone through the brewing process too fast for anything good to come of it.
He let out a little sigh, thinking to himself that he could probably cook with it. Or maybe he couldn’t? WHOO HA HA HA!
on November 2nd, 2008 at 11:40 pm
As Mike can attest to, i brought a few beers to a fellow brewers brew day. One was a brown ale coincidentially. (it always goes wrong with the brown ale doesn’t it?).
Actually this was supposed to be a pale ale for a 4th of july cookout but I got mixed up in the specialty grain, an used roasted malt by mistake. I should have paid more attention, but I used one of my blow off hoses that isn’t food grade to fill my bottles by mistake.
It took a while for the flavor to get really hose tasting, actually everone at the cookout loved it , but when I cracked a few before the brew day in september I realized what had happned. Damn, that was one crappy tasting hosey brown ale. Actually I think that was the name the guys gave it at the brew day.