Pfiff! is hosting this month’s Fermentation Friday a last-Friday-of-the-month blogging event specially made for homebrew bloggers. This month’s topic: Homebrewing Horror Stories!

It was a dark and stormy night. Thunder crashed and lightning flickered, casting blueish light on us as we stood around the old brew pot, with wort a’bubbling. One stir, two stirs, three times round the pot with the brew spoon, smells of midnight mischief filling the kitchen. Time to add the hops, to bitter the brew and darken our souls and holy crap a couple of hop pellets fell out of the mesh bag, rolled under the pot and straight into the flames of the gas burner! Hops on fire! Hops on fire! Gotta move the pot (oof that’s heavy), kill the gas to the burner and try to put out the hop flames without burning any fingers. Finally managing to stub out the pellets like stubbing out a cigarette’s stubborn cherry, the kitchen fills with a new aroma.

It smells like we just lit up.

That’s my best attempt at telling our smoking hops story campfire style. Luckily Ray and I have managed to avoid any true horrors when it has come to brewing. No one has lost a finger or singed off any eyelashes, and if I remember correctly, the burning hop pellet story actually comes from our first brew day, which was a quite normal day, and not a stormy night, à la the three witches in Macbeth.

I also boiled my hand in a wort geyser. Dunno if you remember. It was the one where I screamed a lot and chucked an Erlenmeyer flask at the stove.

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