Bottle Bombs
 

I just woke up this morning at 8:30(I went to bed at 4:00) to what I thought to be a gunshot. I jumped out of bed from a dead sleep and opened my closet to find one of my oatmeal stouts sprayed all over my closet and shards of glass everywhere. My body was in such shock, that I was shaking uncontrollably for about 10 minutes haha.

That was one hell of way to wake up. Also, I've been all grain brewing for over a year now(every saturday) and I'm no noob. I guess either I over carbed it(the rest of the batch was perfectly carbed) or it wasn't done fermenting..even though I left it in primary for 30 days and then bottled.

Anyone else have bottle bomb stories or have any tricks to avoid this? I use brown sugar to bottle and I've never had this problem before. I also don't have the option of throwing them in the fridge after 3 weeks of conditioning(not enough fridge space)

Hmm... might need some info.

1) Are they being stored at a high temperature (80*F or higher)?
2) Did you take a gravity reading to ensure fermentation was done? 30 days is usually good but fermentation can halt sometimes.
3) Did you measure brown sugar for priming in volume or mass/weight? Brown sugar is compressible so 1 cup of brown sugar isn't constant.

They are stored at room temp(roughly 70 degrees). Fermentation was complete. #3 is the problem. I measure in volume(1/2 cup for a 5 gallon batch) I use Norther Brewer's priming sugar calculator. I'm going to start weighing it out now because what you said about it being compressible makes total sense, and I never thought about it. I think you may have just solved my problem sir, many thanks!

How much sugar did you use??

Last stout I made called for around 3 oz of table sugar to prime. Most ales use around 5 so maybe you over primed.

Did you say the bottle that exploded was the only one and the rest were fine? If that's the case I would say you had a bad bottle. That said, weigh your priming sugar. 😊

Ah I think that may be it. Put them in a rubbermaid or something lined with a trashbag to prevent a mess from potential further bottle bombs. It's a shame you don't have more fridge space.

And you can get really cheap digital scales at pretty much any grocery store.

Yeah, it was my last bottle from that batch. I didn't even know I had it until I saw the cap on the ground. From now on I'll be weighing my priming sugar! Thanks everyone for the input.

Oh last bottle, nice. Nothing to worry about.

And yeah I use a digital scale for priming sugar, hops, spices, and water adjustment salts.

My SWMBO tried to brew a simple ginger beer using PET bottles while I was gone recently....the results were...errr....explosive! Huge mess in the kitchen....

I use the same bottles to make carbonated water and pressurize them to about 60PSI....so this one was WAY up there in PSI.

we had two bb incidents both were due to what was probably weak used bottles. since then i store bottles in cases where the bottles are separated by a divider and i also put a blanket on the top to contain the blast

the mess was huge...