Mike C wins 2007 Fall Big Brew Biggest Loser Award
Mike C won the 2007 Fall Big Brew Biggest Loser Award by a landslide. His mishap is even featured on the very popular Basic Brewing podcast for December 27, 2007 (at about 52 minutes in).
Here’s some of the listserv emails explaining what happened to Mike and Scott.
——– Original Message ——–
Subject: [auburnbrewclub.org] Biggest Big Brew Catastrophe Award
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:04:30 -0600
From: John Little
Alright, so we have 3 nominees for the Big Brew Catastrophe Award
(1) Counter Flow Chiller shrinkage - This happened to Scott while using JL’s counterflow chiller. The outer garden hose came undone and shrunk about 2 feet… impossible to pull back up to reattach to its fitting. Todd and Mike spent an hour soldering a new fitting. And this all happened at minute 0 of Scott’s boil… derailing an otherwise perfect brew session.
(2) The 8 gallon Altbier leak - Imagine Mike’s pain to find 8 gallons of freshly brewed Altbier poured into the bottom of his kegerator. I’m reminded of Peter Griffith telling his wife, “Lois, come on were going out to eat.” Lois, standing at the stove cooking said, “But Peter, you already asked me to cook dinner…” to which Peter replied, “I know.. go ahead and throw it away, I just wanted you to stay in practice.”
(3) Better Bottle Implosion - This also happened to Scott, and by this time he just threw his hands in the air and said, “I surrender.” My question is: Who were the idiots that told him they thought it would be ok to pour boiling wort into a Better Bottle?
The Better Bottle now is shaped like a pumpkin or a squash or some other kind of shriveled up vegetable and inspired us to create the Big Brew Catastrophe Award. With some cleanup and witty stuff painted on it, it will make the perfect trophy… to be passed to the next biggest loser after the next Big Brew. Being the lucky recipient of this trophy will be a bright spot to an otherwise catastrophic brew.
Cast your vote!!!
———————————————————————-
On Dec 13, 2007, at 1:02 PM, Stephen wrote:
James,
I’ve heard you mention on the past 4 podcasts that you need more brew catastrophes, so we unintentionally decided to help you out this past weekend. I’ve been brewing for about 9 years, and I saw things this past Saturday that just totally made me cringe. The Auburn Brew Club is newly formed (August this year), and we decided to have our first big brew day. We totaled over 65 gallons at last count on the morning of Saturday the 8th of December. Everything was set up, burners were going, and about 6 hours into the event, the problems started arising. The Host, Scott, was borrowing a counter flow chiller, and for some reason the garden hose came undone from the attachment and couldn’t be pulled back on. Luckily we had Mike, a welder/machinist on site who had tools to reattach the hose. Unfortunately the fix didn’t work correctly, and since Scott was cooling his wort into a better bottle, the second problem occurred: a better bottle implosion (there was much profanity at this point, and Scott wondered if the beer gods somehow did not like him anymore). He expected the wort to be cool coming out of the counter flow chiller, however it was still boiling, and the heat shrunk the better bottle to 1/4 of its original size–basically turning it into a clear wrinkly pumpkin. Meanwhile, others were drinking beer out of a chest milk fridge filled with about 8 corny kegs of homebrew 1 sanke keg of homebrewed German Alt. The faucet on the Alt was opened up when the door closed at one point dumping out 8 gallons of freshly brewed beer along with emptying a 10 pound tank of co2. This was Mike’s beer, so while he was helping Scott, his homebrew was emptying out in the bottom of his fridge.
The end result is we are now voting on the big brew catastrophe award, and so far it appears the trophy will be the shrunken better bottle, and it will probably go to Mike for losing all that beer.
Cheers,
Stephen
Auburn Brew Club
Auburn, Alabama
Filed under: Club News, Events