My Mr. Beer "CinnaBust" Holiday Travesty

Okay, I'd hoped to get through December without dredging up this painful recent episode, but a kind visitor left a comment asking if I'd brewed anything else with my Mr. Beer set since the initial success of the Bewitched Red Ale. Alas, I have and it weren't pretty.

I attempted to brew a nifty sounding cinnamon concoction but, due to my failure to properly and promptly grasp the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, the result can only be considered an unmitigated disaster and I'll probably be kinder in my comments regarding professionally brewed beers from here on out.

The recipe - taken straight from the Mr. Beer website - called for orange zest, cinnamon, nutmeg, honey, and one or two other ingredients, all of which became immaterial when I made the mistake of dumping 3 TABLESPOONS of cinnamon in the wort instead of the 3 TEASPOONS called for in the recipe. I caught the mistake too late and upon hearing me proclaim my disappointment with a quick series of grown up epithets, my wife (who is vastly smarter than I) said, "Just dump it out and start over."

Being a frugal, tightwad son-of-a-gun, I declined to take that good advice, opting instead to delete the remaining spices from the mix, and sticking solely with the orange zest, honey and "loads o' cinnamon" brewing model. I let the stuff percolate in the Mr. Beer keg for a couple weeks, maybe three, but was not encouraged when the yeast immediately dropped to the bottom of the keg in about the first 24 hours.

When it came time to bottle the stuff, I found an odd, slimy green goo laying in the bottom of the keg when the bottling was complete. Undaunted, I packed up the bottles in a plastic-lined box and squirreled them away to brew some more. Then, a couple weeks later, I placed the bulk of the bottles in the fridge to begin their one month lager. At about the one week lagering stage I sampled one of the small test bottles. Ugh. Fiasco.

The stuff poured like thick, sludgy, orange juice concentrate and actually looked like badly mixed orange juice in the glass. There was very little carbonation and that was bad, but what was worse was the smell. OMG (as the hip kids say). It smelled of chemicals - plastic or maybe kerosene. Bleech!

I'm not a chemist (even if the beer I brew smells like chemicals) so I can't put my finger on just exactly when the whole process fell off the tracks but dumping in too much cinnamon may very well have been part of the problem. The other problem is that I rarely heed good advice until well after it is given. Recall that I was advised to dump the wort and start over. Well, I dumped out 6 one-liter bottles this evening.

Whew. With that off my chest, I suppose I can go back to the good beers now, but yes, I will be brewing again, once I wash the smell and taste of kerosene out of these bottles.