One of the most important factors to successful beer, wine or mead making is keeping everything that comes in contact with your product as clean and sanitary as possible.  Sanitizing products are designed to be easy to use, and very effective at reducing the possibility of spoilage due to infection.

One very important point to remember is that an infected batch of beer or wine - while not pleasant to drink - will not harm you.  Any stories of people going blind or being poisoned by homebrew are erroneous and more likely due to a problem with distillation, not fermentation.  Home wine and beer making involves only fermentation and will never include distillation as part of the process.

Keep plenty of extra cleaners and sanitizers on hand.  The correct use of such products can greatly reduce the disappointment and expense of a spoiled batch and are cheap insurance.