half bottle - bottle bomb?

On this last batch of brew I did an Irish Red. Did everything as normal with boiling the 5 ounces of corn sugar and racking on top of it. I got down to my last little bit in the bottling bucket and it only filled half of the bottle. I stuck that bottle in the fridge the other day as a sample and last night I popped the top on it. BIG HUGE pffftt and the volcano started...up and out came this massive amount of foam. Keep n mind that this was only a half bottle.

Im wondering if I should be worried about my others. Could the over carb had been caused because this WAS the last bottle and I got more yeast/trub in it than the other bottles? My FG had stopped and I left it in the carboy for a week after, so it was finished fermenting.

Any thoughts?

How well did you mix in the sugar after you racked on top of it? Sounds like the last bottle(s) slurped up a thicker concentration of sugar.

really didnt stir it a lot. Didnt want to oxygenate it too much. This was the first time I tried to get ALL of the beer from the bottling bucket, too. I usually leave that last inch or two because of the trub but decided to take this one. Maybe there was more sugar in the last bit. I hope so because I certainly dont want 49 bottles of the best batch yet to explode on me. LOL

well....doesn't sound like you waited the standard 3 weeks for it to carb up and have the carbonation pushed into the beer....which I don't know how it would happen witH that much headspace. racking on top is good.

It was the partial bottle that caused the foamer. Your normal bottles are fine.

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I find that racking onto the sugar solution works fine to mix the sugar, I never used to stir the beer when priming and I always had even carbonation. Either you just opened the bottle way too early or you could possibly have an infection. Infections can cause gushers.

Yeah, I had a half bottle at the end too...I just drank it because I read somewhere that too much air space and/or not enough time to carbonate can cause gushers. You're probably fine. I had a bottle bomb after one week of conditioning that actually blew up the bottle. I put one in the freezer for 30 minutes and checked to see if it was carbonated. It was, so I put the rest in there at that time too to avoid any more bombs. If your bottles aren't blowing up then you're probably okay.

But I don't have any idea what I'm doing, so RDWHAHB.

Easy way to find out for sure.... Open one of the full bottles and see how she goes. If it ends up being a "foamer" maybe you get as many as you can in the fridge and take precautions for bottle bombs with the others.

Chances are it is the fact that it was half full and you will be able to relax as soon as you open another.

BigFloyd said:

It was the partial bottle that caused the foamer. Your normal bottles are fine.

Click to expand...

Exactly. The other bottles are actually my best brew yet.