Advice Needed: Bottle Bombs

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BrewLocal365

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Last night, shortly after I had gone to bed, I heard a loud "pop/thump" from downstairs. I thought something might have fallen off the kitchen counter. I went downstairs to check it out. It was my first ever bottle bomb.

First off, I know what I should do per standard advice: don protective gear and carefully open and re-cap my bottles. But before I do that I want to check with the boards to make sure it makes sense given the situation or if there are any other thoughts.

This is a Pliny the Elder clone (big and hoppy IPA) that spent 2 weeks in primary, just under 2 weeks in secondary, and as of Monday 3 weeks in the bottle. The gravity never changed after about the first week in primary, so fermentation was complete.

I opened a bottle for the first time on Sunday (a day before it was technically done in the bottle) and it was the most carbonated beer I'v ever brewed. I assumed it was because I mishandled the bottle and then poured too excitedly, but this thing had HEAD. And it was delicious. Definitely not infected.

I had them bottle conditioning in my kitchen because it had been too cold in my basement, but as of Monday I probably should have put everything down in the basement because it HAS been getting warmer and earlier in the week it started consistently hitting the 70s and even the 80s outside, so the bottles definitely got warmer than was ideal but I wasn't thinking about it.

Part of the reason I wasn't thinking about it was because I made this batch with a friend who lives 4 hours away and was going to split it up and bring him half this Friday, so I was going to put his in the car and put mine downstairs at this time. The trip will probably also involve a car ferry for about an hour (this is option but makes the trip a lot easier).

I used the amount of priming sugar per Beer Smith, although I did have one SNAFU: I bottled 5 bottles before realizing that I forgot to add the priming sugar. I opened the ones I had done and poured them back in, covered the bucket with some sanitized foil, boiled the priming sugar at that time, let it cool, and then got on with it. Because I was flustered and pissed at myself and now in a bit of a rush (because I had some place to go and this was wasting time), it's possible I could have mis-measured the sugar, but the bag of corn sugar that I had was only 5oz total, so I couldn't have gone that far overboard.

So here are my case-specific questions:

  1. Given how much money we spent on hops for this one, will the lovely hops aroma be sacrificed if I open and re-cap? My friend is a huge hop-head so I woudl really like to avoid losing that aroma upon opening the bottle. As I said if this was one of my Session Bitters I would just pop and recap, no worry.
  2. What are the chances that I might be OK by throwing the beer in a cooler and moving it to my basement to take 10-15 degrees off the temperature? Fridge is not an option at this point.
  3. How much of an added risk is the car ride / possible ferry ride? I don't imagine any shaking is good for the situation?
  4. Any other ideas?
I DON'T want to give my friend any potentially dangerous bottle bombs but I also want to preserve the hop quality of this beer he is so excited for. If it weren't for creating a risk for him and his wife I would probably chill the bottles, put them in a cooler in the basement for now, put that in the car on Friday and go and roll the dice on losing some during the trip. I'd rather lose quantity than quality on this one because he is so excited about it. But I can't give him bottles knowing they might blow up.

I'm eager to hear any creative ideas, or to hear that opening and re-capping won't risk losing the hoppiness. If I do go through that process, how long do I have to leave the cap off before re-capping? As I've seen with the one I drank, there is plenty of CO2 in suspension so I'm not worried about it being flat.

Thanks!
 
I'd chill the lot for 24 hrs min then check another bottle before messing with them.


The "over carbed" bottle could have been really a not done carbing bottle where the co2 was in the head space and not really absorbed back into the beer yet. I know you were at almost 3 weeks, but it could have been a slow carbing beer due to high ABV. Don't know but maybe even all thos hops could stress the yeast and slow down carbing.

The bottle bomb could have been a single infected bottle.
 
So everything is now on ice. Tomorrow I'll open one up as a test case and see how over-carbonated it is. I now plan to truck them to my friend's house on ice in the cooler, but still have concerns about the road shaking them up, and I need to check with my friend to see what type of storage he has. If he has no way to keep them adequately cool (I had told him his basement would be OK) I guess I have no choice but to re-cap before I leave? What impact will that have on the hoppy-ness? May basement is a bit of a sticky mess right now from the second bomb, but at least it smells AMAZING!
 
What was the final gravity of the beer? A second bomb is not a great sign. You may want to open these and re-cap...

Chilling will help I think either way.
 
Chilling will definitely help. It'll put the yeast to sleep to prevent further overcarbonation, and it'll drastically reduce the pressure.

Attached is a graph I made real quick. If you're at 5 volumes of CO2 (just a random guess) you'd be at 90 psi at 80 degrees, but only 32 psi at 32 degrees. So chilling them down and keeping them cold will bring it back into the safety zone.

pressure.gif
 
Bottle bombs are the one thing that as a new homebrewer I haven't experienced yet, but that I personally wouldn't want to mess around with.

It might be an overreaction on my part, and many with much more experience than yours truly might tell me that it is, but...

If I had two verified bottle bombs in one batch? I'd don a pair of safety glasses, gloves, and extra clothing, chill those bottles down to just above freezing, uncap and dump.

Yeah, I might waste a really good beer that others with more experience than I might think could be saved, but if someone got hurt from my homebrew? Well, that's one risk I just can't imagine ever wanting to take.

Cheers!
 
So I'm gathering from this thread that moving them around can sometimes set off bottle bombs? I am looking at my first beer, almost 2 weeks carbonating, I just moved the bottles cause I figured at this point I would've gotten a bottle bomb by now. Wrong, I moved them to a cooler darker spot in my apartment last night. Come 10:30pm last night I hear a loud pop, glad I looked cause two bottles bottle bombed.

I'm inclinded to think its the bottles, since they were part of the first bottles I bottled (bottles previously had Alaskan amber in them) I figured they were the least likely to bottle bomb. When you add priming sugar does it tend to instantly sink to the bottom? If I chill the other ones in Alaskan bottles, will this basically stop any more from bottle bombing?

Edit: Clarification I bottled out of primary.
 
While I get that the packet said 5 oz of sugar it matters as to the actual final volume of beer it was used to prime. Ideally .75-1 oz per FINISHED gallon of beer is a benchmark. If you bottled less than 5 gallons and used the full 5 oz then you over primed the beer.

Over carbonated is over carbonated and while chilling the bottles will help the beer will still be over carbonated. Yes, you can uncap, release pressure and re-cap but you may then ultimately wind up with flat beer:(

Also, just because the first bottle you originally tasted was fine doesn't mean that an infection hasn't taken hold in the bottles. There is also the risk of oxidation since you emptied the first 5 bottles back into the finished beer and resumed the process of bottling, not a huge risk but a risk none the less.........

Even if you place the bottles in a fridge they should still be in some sort of container as they can still potentially explode. A properly carbonated beer should not explode just because you moved it around. If this were the case there would be warnings on every bottle of commercially produced beer that is bottle conditioned:D
 
I opened one of the now-chilled 12oz bottles. It was not a gusher, but just like the first bottle from Sunday it produced a ridiculous amount of head no matter how I poured it. If I repeat tomorrow I'll take a picture but it was pretty much, in a pint glass, one inch of liquid with the remainder being head until it settled. Them I still had half a bottle to pour, carefully, in increments.

The final bottling volume was nearly 5 gallons. With the dry hops it filled my 5G secondary to capacity. I lost a little to spillage while racing to the bottling bucket and the hops absorbed quite a bit, but I wouldn't expect to be so fat under as to be a concern, but you live and you learn.

The beer again tasted fine, so is be surprised if it is an infection. Then again I also don't know what I'd be looking for.

I think that my fermentation, which was in early April, was a tiny bit under attenuated due to a temp around 65 degrees. I have no temp control other than my thermostat. The FG was around 1.010 I I remember correctly and was stable, but the yeast may have just been chilly. When the kitchen temps hit 75 to 80 degrees earlier this week it could have provided a kick start. Add to that some rushed sugar measurement and loss of beer to just under 5G and it could just be a number of smaller pieces taken together that led to my over carbonation.

So far keeping them on ice has done the trick. We will see if any more blow by tomorrow morning. My friend prefers me to deliver them as-is so that he can experience the full hops. He's going to refrigerate them immediately and I have warned him. I'm also going to give him all the 22-24 oz bottles because other bombs were 12oz. Perhaps the physics favors the large bottles.

I may recap the small bottles that I keep for myself. I can't keep them on ice forever. I may end up with flat or oxidized beer?, but I'll just have to prioritize it in my drinking schedule :)
 
I just started doing 1 gallon kits this spring. It has been interesting to learn about all grain brewing while working with small volumes. The initial kit I purchased said to use honey as the priming sugar. It was a really small amount and I figured it would work out fine. I let the bottles sit and carbonate for a few weeks. The first one was good after only a week but the rest were gushers. 1" liquid in a pint glass and the rest foam.

I had two large bottles set aside to enjoy with my neighbor. Knowing they were going to be super foamy, I poured the two bottles into a tear shaped wine decanter. The decanter is from Crate and Barrel and was pretty cheap. It is like a chocolate chip with a spout on top. The center of the bottom has a nipple ( for lack of a better term) like many wine bottles have.

So once I poured the foamy beers into the decanter, I was able to pour out proper glasses of beer for my neighbor and I. I didn't have to with around for the foam to disperse but I did use smaller glasses, (half pint or there abouts). Worked out well! Hopefully no more foamy beers or bottle bombs with the next batch!
 
You're not being safe here. If the beer truly measured at 1.010 before bottling, your *best case* scenario here is that you didn't mix the priming sugar well enough and so you have some bottles that are over carbed and some that are under.

It's far more likely that you have an infection. And if the beer still tastes decent, that means there's still "stuff" left for your infecting agent to eat. Which means the pressure could potentially keep building.

There is no way I would pass those bottles along to a friend of mine. He could get seriously hurt -- or at least end up with one hell of a mess.

They call them bottle bombs for a reason, unfortunately.
 
I had two large bottles set aside to enjoy with my neighbor. Knowing they were going to be super foamy, I poured the two bottles into a tear shaped wine decanter. The decanter is from Crate and Barrel and was pretty cheap. It is like a chocolate chip with a spout on top. The center of the bottom has a nipple ( for lack of a better term) like many wine bottles have.

Uncle, I believe the correct terminology is "punt".
 
I looked it up and actually the FG was 1.017, not 1.010. My bad! Target per the recipe was 1.015, but I just couldn't get it there. I don't have temperature control, so I couldn't give it a boost, either. That gives me some hope that I can open and re-cap.

Can anyone explain what a gusher infection would TASTE like vs. simply an initially under-fermented and now over-carbed beer??
 
Can anyone explain what a gusher infection would TASTE like vs. simply an initially under-fermented and now over-carbed beer??

I can, unfortunately.

It starts out tasting like beer. It was probably really promising coming out of the fermenter and seemed like a winner going into bottles (crappy batches never get infected).

You pop the first one a week into carbing -- because who can wait -- and amazingly it's already pretty fizzy. It also tastes a bit thinner than before, but that could be just a trick of the bubbles.

Another week goes by and the beer is *really* fizzy this time. And it definitely tastes different now. It might just be that it's overcarbonated, but after giving it a swirl and some time to settle down, nope, it's definitely less flavorful than it was before. It also smells a little funny now, too, but it turns out that's just all the CO2 bursting out of solution and blowing up your nostrils.

That's when you think, you know, if I throw these all in the fridge RIGHT now maybe I can still at least salvage drinkability out of this batch. If you're lucky, that's what happens. If you're not, it's already too far gone and from here on out it gets worse, until you're left with some wildly overcarbonated beverage that tastes like a mixture of beer and club soda once the bad guys are done munching on all the flavor the cultivated yeast left behind.

It's depressing as hell.

Try whatever you want to try, but if it's infected, nothing's going to be worth the effort you could instead apply to a new batch. And seriously, think about how comfortable you are with even the small probability one of these goes off in your friend's hand or refrigerator.
 
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