The beer didn’t brew properly. It is unclear at which point it went wrong but certainly it didn’t carbonate although I doubt that was all. In two bottles I used honey instead of the sugar they provided and they nearly exploded when I opened them, although they still tasted like shit. It is possible that the beer wasn’t kept warm enough, the instructions that came with it suggested keeping it at 18-20 degrees but I found things online suggesting 20-22 degrees so that may have been an issue. I also didn’t properly use the little oxygen / carbon dioxide thing, which has a proper name that I can’t remember, but which you put in the little hole at the top of the fermenting barrel. There were no instructions on it with the brewing kit as a whole so I just put it in place but discovered halfway through the brewing process that it was supposed to have either distilled water or some spirit to help filter the air going in and out. I put whisky in it but it may have been too late. I did notice on about day two that something had happened with the fermentation process and it seemed like it had risen pretty high so maybe that thing without liquid was an issue. Saying that it did ferment I think because the barrel was full of yeasty dough like gunk at the bottom so something happened.
Clearly then it could have been many things but what I am left with now is this sickly liquid, not thick like syrup but it seems as if it would like to become so. The two bottles which I used honey as the sugar are now gone, one partly over the wall, sink and table top as I opened it and the rest in my belly. There was one bottle which seemed to carbonate slightly using the sugar they gave, that is also now drunk as is one of the sickly sugary bottles that didn’t work. I suspect then that the rest will be going straight down the drain which is a terrible shame but the inevitable conclusion to a failed attempt.
Is this the end of my beer making career, most likely not but that will probably be down to whether I view it as an obstacle in the road or an experience to learn more, which would ultimately make it a success. That then would be the lesson we could learn from every situation that doesn’t work out as we had initially thought and hoped it would. These moments are not failures, but opportunities, now you know more about what you are trying to achieve and yourself in the the process. What a wonderful opportunity failure is, why do we not see it for the balancing yin and yang that it is and as some bad negative thing. It will only ever be how we view it and that is the one thing we at least have control over.
Observations and Misunderstandings 