First "gusher"

Hey all,

I've got an IPA that I brewed a few months ago, been bottle conditioning for at least 2, maybe 3 months. Been drinking it for a few weeks, a six here and a six there, everything is great!

I popped a six in the fridge yesterday morning, poured one last night, it was fine. I got home today about 2:30 and felt kinda parched, so I opened another one. I popped the cap off, and watched the foam slowly rise to the top. I quickly poured some into my glass to prevent unacceptable beer loss. I got maybe 1/4 of the glass filled with beer, the rest was foam. I'm slowly able to pour more into the glass, but the odd thing is the foam in the bottle keeps slowly coming up the neck. Weird.

Looking at the glass, it looks like I've got some "floaties" swimming around in the brew, kind of like trub from the primary. Everything tastes fine, delicious in fact, and once the head is under control it's beautiful. The only weird things are the foam and the floaties.

So the question is: What would cause a single bottle out of the batch to be a gusher? I'm better than halfway through the batch and the rest have been just fine. In fact, if anything, they're a little undercarbonated.

Any explanations?

Sounds like you may have more than just yeast and sugars in your bottle!
You may have missed a little bit of "stuff" when you cleaned/sanitized your bottles.

Or, with the other bottles seeming a little undercarbed, you may not have mixed the priming sugar thoroughly enough and got too much in some of the bottles and not enough in the rest!
Just my 2cents but as long as they taste good, who cares!!!

Two possibilities come to mind. 1. Somehow that single bottle got an infection that started eating more sugars than the yeast normally would, causing too much carbonation. 2. Maybe that single bottle ended up with more sugar in the solution than the rest of your beers, possibly by not mixing well enough.

You might be right with the priming sugar not mixing. I doubt if it's an infection. It still smells and tastes delicious.

I had an issue that I shared in a previous post where I tasted the last few ounces left in my bottling bucket and it tasted WAY sweet. I've changed my procedure since then so that I gently stir the beer in the bucket to evenly distribute the priming sugar. Hopefully no problems in the future.

Time to go test another bottle... All in the name of science of course.

This *exact* thing happened to me. IPA, most bottles fine, some bottles slow gushers and maybe one that was a fast gusher, and all of the gushers had floaties in 'em. I found the answer somewhere on HBT, where someone explained that it was the hop particles, my floaties, that were causing some beers to gush. Think of it like dropping a mentos into diet coke. It makes the diet coke gush because the mentos provides all of these little nooks an crannies -- nucleation points -- for the CO2 in solution to latch onto and pop out of solution all at once. That's what your heavily-textured hop particles are doing at the bottom of your bottles.

Be more careful with siphoning and bottling to keep the hop crud out of your bottles and it shouldn't happen again.

Oh, and I dryhopped with loose hop pellets, which probably made things worse. Not sure if you did that or not.

As I recall, I did dry hop this one with loose hop pellets. Funnily enough, I was watching MythBuster snippets on YouTube today and saw the Mentos episode. Makes perfect sense, the floaties I mean. More careful racking, and not getting greedy when bottling will help.

Second bottle looks and tastes fine. In the name of science, of course.

without knowing your priming method, let me share mine with you that gives consistency.

1. Weigh out sugar
2. Put sugar in a pyrex measuring device and add half the weight in water (6oz sugar : 3 oz water)
3. Place in microwave for one minute
4. Stir and microwave one more minute
5. Add syrup to bottling bucket and rack on top (cool if you are nervous)
6. Stir beer every six bottles.

This gets even distibution every time for me and I have yet to have a problem with carbonation. That said, I rarely get a foamer, but it still happens. I actually just got one on a five month old Belgian and just chalked it up to the yeast, not the method of bottling or infection.

Matt,

That's pretty much what I've started doing, except I use the stovetop, and instead of stirring every six bottles I stir "every so often". Probably comes out about the same though.

Then I wouldn't worry about it any. You will have problems if you decide to pour the sugar into the bottling bucket and bottle without stirring like I did the first time. Then you get inconsistency.

I wouldn't worry at all. I get the occasional commercial brewer's bottle that does the same thing. It might also be that it was a bottle from the bottom of the bucket. I now label the final six or so bottles that I bottle and I find it happens more often with "the bottom of the bucket".

Yep, I now add an X to my last few beers so I know to drink them myself and not serve them to friends, just in case.

smokinghole said:

It might also be that it was a bottle from the bottom of the bucket. I now label the final six or so bottles that I bottle and I find it happens more often with "the bottom of the bucket".

Click to expand...

That happens to me when I try to get that last little bit out of the bucket. There is a lot of sediment on the last 2-3 bottles and have found that when I opened them, they gushed some.

I have persistent problems with foaming bottles. I'll try putting a screen on my racking can. For priming, I use sugar drops that are supposed to be for 12-oz bottles, but they even make my 16-oz bottles foam. I know that I don't have infection problems, and my attenuation is usually good. I guess I'll have to just keep fiddling with it to get it right.

Sounds to me like the priming sugar wasn't mixed well enough. I've tasted a gusher or two that were infected. They tasted like a goat spit in my mouth after going down on Amy Winehouse

Quit screwing with the drops and just make up some syrup to rack your beer on top of and gently stir. I stopped using corn sugar for priming and went to lite DME. Things have been good good.

http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/priming.html

smokinghole said:

Quit screwing with the drops and just make up some syrup to rack your beer on top of and gently stir.

Click to expand...

I'll try it. Thanks. I should say that I mostly keg, and bottle only about 6 pints from each batch. What syrup recipe would you recommend for that amount?

Unless you're filling the 6 pints because they don't fit in the keg I would just fill them from the keg after its carbonated and cap them quick. Then you don't have to worry about priming sugar in the bottles.

If you're bottling them because they don't fit in the keg 6 pints will be roughly 96 oz of beer (depending on how full you fill the bottle) which is 3/4 a gallon. So you can either use .7 or .8 as your gallon value on the tastebrew calculator. Depending on the beer you'll be doing about 1oz or less of priming sugar for the small amount of beer.

Yeah, it's because it doesn't fit the keg. So if I want to fill 6-16 oz bottles, I would make a syrup of 1 oz of DME in a few ounces of water? And what is this tastebrew calculator of which you speak?

glockentalk said:

Yeah, it's because it doesn't fit the keg. So if I want to fill 6-16 oz bottles, I would make a syrup of 1 oz of DME in a few ounces of water? And what is this tastebrew calculator of which you speak?

Click to expand...

http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/priming.html

Many thanks!

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