Brewtastrophes

In contrast to the Mead Log - which just has everything I've done, as-is - no matter how well it turned out, how many mistakes were made, or how massive of a course-correction was made mid-brew - this page is reserved for brews that, simply put... were failures.

While I hope to be able to save these brews with secondary additions and/or balancing - these brews reached the point where I originally anticipated they would be finished, and simply didn't taste good at all.

Read this as transparency that not everything I do is successful, as a series of lessons learned on things not to do, and if I'm able to salvage any of these, some tips on things that might be able to save your own brewtastrophes.

Chai Brews

The first of these fermented so fast and aggressively that it tasted and smelled like a sour beer, and I was convinced it had become infected, so I queued up a second attempt. As the first began to age and as the second fermented similarly, it became clear the yeast just like chai tea and the aggressive fermentation creates some combination of off-flavors and/or CO2 that mimic the sour beer taste/smell to me, but neither brew was actually infected.

That said - they're overly tannic. I used a 1:1 replacement of chai tea to water, and it was simply too much. Not to mention, I don't think I personally enjoy the flavor of fermented chai tea. I attempted to balance these with tartaric acid, which helped, but I still just don't like the base flavor I'm working with. I attempted to further save these by blending them with the "Floral Hydromel" that's further down on this page, which also helped, but I still just... don't like the base flavor.

I'm playing with the idea of using secondary fruit or floral additions to further correct this brew, and I haven't quite given up on it yet. But I would strongly recommend starting with significantly less tea in your brews, especially until you've tasted what that particular tea tastes like after going through primary fermentation.

Dandelion Wine

I almost don't want to put this here because dandelion wine or mead is totally a thing, but mine didn't work out. First among the several problems I had - I believe there's a smaller kind of dandelion, maybe a varietal or something, that just doesn't have as good of a flavor as the bigger ones. I've been playing around with trying this again (properly), and found a noticeable difference in the smell between these two "kinds" of dandelions near me - the bigger ones almost smell like honey, the smaller ones smell like... well, weeds. Grassy, perhaps. But the bad ones are most of what was available, so that was most of what went into my first attempt.

I also don't think I picked enough of them, and I needed to bolster the recipe either with raisins (for tannic value, not as a nutrient) or with honey, or both, as basically just dandelions and a little bit of fruit juice/zest just isn't enough.

This has been bubbling fairly consistently, albeit slowly, as recently as early 2021, so I've been letting it sit to finish doing whatever it's doing before I make an attempt to salvage the existing batch.

Floral Hydromel

I was attempting to scale up a nano batch I had used with an even mix of hibiscus and butterfly pea blossoms with some "minor" changes that made the recipe more like the famous Heartbound recipe... but the changes just didn't work out. I need to either fully commit to the original nano recipe - which came out tasting like a rosé wine (not necessarily my personal favorite flavor, but it was a well-done rosé base flavor) - or fully commit to following the original Heartbound recipe. This 50-50 thing, rather than being a good middle ground between the two, failed to achieve the strengths of either brew. It could've been worse but it's easily outclassed by either of the alternatives that use the same ingredients so I don't know why you'd ever make this over one of the others.

Blackberry Coffee

This is very astringent right now, and I suspect the problem is that I used blackberry puree, so I did not have fruit skins to introduce tannins to offset the combined acidity of the coffee and the puree. This may also need to be sweetened further, but frankly, it also has a base flavor that I'm simply not enjoying. I certainly hope to save this one eventually, as it is a ~6 gallon batch, but at the moment I cannot recommend attempting this.

First Draft of the Great Mead Project

Flame out after you put the brew bag in.

On an "unrelated" note, this one tastes like burned brew bag.