Bottle Bombs?

Out of curiosity, how many people have experienced "bottle bombs" (exploding bottles due to excessive pressure)? Do you have or have heard horror stories? When do the bottles tend to explode - soon or weeks after bottling?

I don't remember who it was....but somebody on this forum had bottles that had too much pressure and while trying to open one the bottle broke and he ended up with stitches on his hand!

Nice avatar!

I don't mean to hi-jack this thread, but here are the full size pics from which my avatar is taken: I did this to win ticketsd to a sold out System Of A Down concert a couple years ago.







Me and SWMBO after I won the tickets. WAHH!

I"ve never had a bottle bomb (knock on wood) so I can't answer this but

{hijack} I've been meaning ...cough... cough...to say something ...ummm...about that avatar

Of course in Las Vegas seeing that on the street wouldn't cause much of a stir

I have. This was like 8 years ago, when a series of failed beer attempts (that were ALL my fault) caused me to take a break from brewing.

I bottled a stout that had a stuck fermentation. I did not relax, I did not have a homebrew. I also didn't have access to resources like this, so I decided that the mid 20's for gravity on the stout must be a good final gravity. After all it had been in primary 10 days already.

Bout a month later I hear a weird 'pop.....shhhhhhhhh' come from the closet in the bedroom where I stored my cases. It looked like 1 bottle had actually exploded, and it took out 4 more adjacent bottles. It was a frothy mess of shrapnel.

I chilled the remaining bottles, and started opening them. each one gushed a third of its contents out, totally suspended the yeast, and it just tasted bad. I bottled probably .010 points too soon, when I could've just swirled the bucket or pitched another sachet of yeast.

I've learned patience in the last 8 years and now my beers have all been well since my return in June.

The only way to get bottle grenades is to:

1. Bottle too soon
2. Over prime
3. Combination of either of the above with excess warm temp conditioning...

Point being, if your brew has completed fermentation and you don't over prime then you have nothing to worry about. Of course, excessive temp while conditioning will result in gushers from over carbing they usually do not result in grenades.

no bombs but i did have to vent my barleywine 4 times as the caps kept losing the indent from the capper.
hb99 is right - i had overprimed even though the recipe stated 1/2-2/3 cup, i went with 1 cup as my batch was a little bigger.

Yes I did last June. Lost all but 12 bottles. Good thing I was conditioning them in a chest freezer. When I found the mess, I dropped the temp to 30°F to stop the explosions. Since the bombs were the result of an infection, I opened the rest of the bottles in the tub.

Wild

I had one single bottle break out of 150 beers I have bottled. I'm thinking maybe that bottle had a crack in it I didn't see.

I have had one explode in a case that resulted in the rest of the case exploding. Loud, and no fun.

Seems like as good a place as any to make my first post. I've started brewing with five friends and almost a month ago we bottled a hefeweizen but added a lot of raspberry flavoring just before bottling (in addition to priming sugar). The bottles and one growler sat at room temp for five or six days. Then I moved them down to the much cooler basement and an hour or so later I heard a pretty loud "boom." I immediately knew it was the beer and went downstairs to find beer oozing out from under the door to the (carpeted) room that the beer was in. The growler had exploded. It was pretty impressive. The base of the growler was still sitting on the floor with the majority of the rest of it laying nearby. A few pieces and shards were around but not too bad to cleanup. The beer, on the other hand, had reached pretty far up the wall and has left our basement carpet infused with a strong raspberry beer smell.

I then feared that bottles were going to start blowing one by one, but to date none have. I figure it was one or more of these three things: overpriming by failing to account for the raspberry flavoring; too much lingering yeast as it was the last container we filled with hefe; and/or a weakened growler.

On a related note, I'm switching to kegs.

Your problem was the growler itself. They are not structured to withstand the inner force pressure of a carbonated beverage.

LAST NIGHT - I participated in a home brew exchange. A guy sent a 6-pack up from TX to WI. It was called Double Buzzard Coffee Stout and I had 1 bottle left that I had not drunk yet.

I walked into the basement to get a shovel and whiffed . . . . . beer. That was odd, beer smell coming from my brewery. Got shovel but had a big "?" above my head.

Walked back and approached my brewery and saw beer on the floor and a bottle with no bottom on the table.

Looked like the bottle exploded about an inch from the bottom, glass about 10 feet away with round spatter marks.

My first batch of cider exploded on me. I wasn't a big fan of the cider I brewed so i decided to let the bottles age in my pantry for a while. After a few months our pantry started to reek of alcohol, sure enough most of the bottles I had aging in there had all exploded. It made a huge mess, but no damage to anything.

I've also had the top of bottles snap off when popping the cap.

My first batch of cider went on me too. I was in college at the time, and decided to brew up some cider for the ladies as an alternative to the beer my roommates were brewing up . I went to a homebrew shop in LA and they recommended pitching some champagne into unfiltered apple juice jugs from Trader Joes, adding some raisins, covering the top of the jugs with cheesecloth and just letting it happen. Sounded simple enough. Bottling time came around and I added a pinch of table sugar to each bottle (way too much with champagne yeast and regular beer bottles).

I stored the cider in 12 packs under my bed to let it ferment for a while. About a week later I woke up to the sound of exploding glass . Big sticky mess everywhere.

After cleanup I CAREFULLY moved the bottles outside our apartment door and every once in a while another one would go off spraying glass and sticky mess all over the place. When my roommates and I came home we would hurry past the door I ended up drinking a couple bottles before eventually pitching the batch as a safty hazard. They poured a full pint glass full of foam. I couldn't help but just laugh.

Fun times! This was my first introduction to brewing, and while it wasn't ideal, it taught me a great lesson and me and my old roommates still laugh about Time Bomb Brew Co.

my first batch i ran out of sanitized bottles due to severe under planning. looked in the fridge and saw swmbo's half bottle of parrot bay.

well parrot bay is not nearly as good as beer so down the sink it went.

about 5 days later i checked on my closet and glass/beer everywhere. the closet still smells like beer.