How NOT to Brew Beer

This story should start with the mess.

Sticky, syrupy, near boiling wort, roiling out of the pot with a vengeance. It charged at the two of us in an explosion of foam and fluid, aiming to blind us by boiling our eyes within their sockets, but instead cascaded up and up and up, flowing against gravity, against all reason. At the peak of this geyser of superheated mass it paused for effect, seemingly eyeing my kitchen with a dull, animal-like hatred. Then it unfurled itself, spreading out in midair and came plummeting down, coating everything in sight in this sticky, syrupy, near-boiling blanket of fluid, somewhow larger in volume than the pot it spawned from.

In the shocked and horrified calm after the assault, we checked our eye sockets to find that the beast of wort had not scoured the eyes from our faces. I could hear the hiss of natural gas flowing out of the burner, its flame snuffed out by the blanketing of sticky, syrupy, cooling goo, that now appeared to contain some mushy bits of hop pellet muck. I clicked off the gas. Wort continued to sheet down the ceiling and walls, pooling on the stove and in the burner recesses and at our feet. The air hung thick with hops, malt and a grainy scent that was the essence of the five species chosen for the recipe. We trudged through the muck to begin the long process of cleaning up, heads hung low in defeat and shame.

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In other news, Matt and I brewed a batch of Scottish ale yesterday. As the pot neared its boil, Matt tossed in all the hop pellets at once, which acted as a fistful of boiling chips, sending the pot boiling over a little bit. Matt was a huge trooper, doing the majority of the cleanup, as I was busy holding Curt, who wanted desperately to get into every bit of it.

The beast of a wort is now safely contained in a sturdy carboy, venting happly through a level headed blow-off tube, and I'll be racking it over to a secondary fermenter within a day or two. I have high hopes for a yummy batch.