So last weekend I brewed what I thought was going to be a Valentine's Day Chocolate Mint Stout. I spent hours reading about styles and what ingredients would make the best choice for the chocolate and mint flavors.

I bought all the ingredients on Saturday afternoon and started brewing first thing in the morning on Sunday. I'm in the process of converting from extract to all-grain brewing. The thing that is holding me back is that I'm building a Mash Tun out of a big picnic cooler (like the ones that the players use to dump water over the coach's head). So there's a couple of parts that I need to buy before I can finish that.

So I decided to do a mini-mash extract recipe. All that means is that you steep some whole grains in a pot of hot water for a period of time, then drain it, add the extract to the drained liquid and boil. I decided to use the mini mash as a test run of a full mash. Everything was going great, I steeped the grains, sparged them with hot hot water, added the extract and some hops, boiled it for an hour, added some more hops and I was ready to transfer it to the carboy to ferment. Here's where I made my first decision that I regret. I usually ferment in the plastic bucket for a week or so and then transfer the beer to a glass carboy for a secondary fermentation. But this time, I decided to use my second-hand glass carboy as the primary. (I had my eye on a new carboy that I was going to have to buy for the secondary.)

And here is the second mistake I really regret: Usually at this stage, I cool the hot wort (that's what the pre-fermented beer is called) with a contraption I made that is basically a coil of copper tubing that connects to the faucet on one end and water runs out the other end. Well, we recently moved (six months and a few batches ago) and the sink isn't the same as the old sink, so the quick connect fitting doesn't fit so I coudln't chill the wort that way. I've known about this problem for months, but have I fixed it? No.

Now when you brew with extract you don't normally boil the entire batch, instead you boil about 3 gallons of it and then add that to two gallons of water in the carboy. Well for some reason, I decided to add the hot wort to the carboy first, then add the water second (mistake No. 3) - that was a stupid decision that ruined my day (and my carboy). So I've got a carboy half full of 200-degree liquid and I'm adding cold liquid to it. Well, the sink sprayer sprayed some water onto the outside of the glass (I had nothing to do with it) and I hear an awful CRACKing sound. Then I notice that there's a torrential flood of hot wort billowing out the back of the carboy and running down the drain. Arghhh!!! Say it ain't so.

Thankfully I had a sanatized plastic bucket sitting nearby. I was able to grab the kitchen sponge, hold it on the crack (hoping the 5-gallon carboy full of near boiling liquid wasn't going to shatter into shards of hot glass) and siphon the stuff into the bucket. So all is well, right? Well not really. You see I have no idea how much water I added to the wort and how much wort deceneded down the drain. So I did my best to remember at what level the liquid was and how long it ran before I plugged the crack.

I ended up filling the fermenter to about 4.5 gallons, which was probably too much. I took a reading to get the Original Gravity of the beer and it came out at 1.034, which is really, really low. It was supposed to be in the 1.045 range. That means that when the yeast finishes converting all the sugar to alcohol, this beer will probably be about 2% alcohol by volume. 

Now it's entirely possible that the reading I took was from a more diluted portion of the wort than it actually was. That's probably just wishful thinking. The beer will probably be ready to bottle soon. So I'll keep you posted on it's condition. 

But the silver lining is that I came up with a new name: Disaster Ale #1. I figure this won't be the last time that I screw up or something out of my control causes a batch to go bad. One of the things I like most about homebreweing is the creativity I can have not only making the beer, but also the labels.

So if this beer turns out decent enough to share, I'm going to write this on the label: Welcome to the first in an inevitable series of Disaster Ales (and someday lagers). Due to the stupidity of the brewer, this beer is pitifully low in alcohol (I'll go on to describe it's other problems...) So enjoy this beer and take comfort in the fact that it caused its brewer much anguish. 

Here's to a long time before the next beer in the Disaster Ale series.

Cheers!