There’s no such thing as excessive sanitation. It might be more than is necessary, but the only harm is wasted time and materials. Bad sanitation, on the other hand, can ruin the whole batch. Make sure your equipment is cleaned first, and then sanitized. Clean it to remove particles of food, which can harbor bacteria. You cant sanitize a dirty vessel or hose. It just doesn’t work.
10. Brewing drunk
This one factor affects everything previously mentioned. You start out great. Got your checklist ready, equipment sanitized, ingredients weighed and lined up, and all your prep done. You start the mash, set the timer and pour a nice bottle. Trust me, this is the beginning of the end. After a couple of bottles you remember a pack of hops with a little left in it, and recalculate your recipe to use them instead of a fresh pack.
You get your math wrong. When lautering, you forget to close the valve on the boil kettle, and the wort goes all over the floor. Then you misread the boil gravity and add too much LME. Then you fail to stir it properly and carbonize it on the bottom of the kettle. Need I go on?
Just remember; don’t drink to excess and brew. If you can control yourself and drink just one, fine. If not, send me an account of your experience when you sober up, and I might include it in a follow up article.
Ive given you the Top 10; now here’s a bonus. Don’t obsess about every minor detail. I know that might sound contradictory to the Top 10, but really its not. Basically, the only thing you really must get right is safety. Other than that, the worst that can happen is to waste time and material. Just get in there and get some experience. Make some effort to avoid batch-ruining mistakes, and when you make mistakes, learn from them and keep getting better. But make sure you and your brewer friends are having fun; there’s really no other reason to get into a hobby like this.
Contributions by Home Brew Talk Forum Members
I wish to thank the HBT forum members for their input. It really was an indispensable part of helping me identify and narrow down the Top 10, and I learned quite a few things. It is not sensible to include every comment; to read the whole list, go right to the thread. There will probably be additional helpful contributions after this article is written. Everyone’s contribution was helpful, and I have selected a few to include here: