The Gusher Scare!

So I got really frustrated because one of my batches "finished" at 1.022. I bottled anyway, out of frustration and figuring "oh, I used a lot of crystal 120L, and it was dark extract.... It's been in primary for almost 1.5 months... I remember reading that this yeast blah blah..."

So about a week and a half after bottling I noticed that one of the bottlecaps from this batch wasn't what I was used to; no little divet on top. It was the only one outside of the cases I kept the batches in, so I had to open it first... OCD I guess.

I assumed I had a bunch of bottle bombs. I open the bottle, and WOOSH out comes all the beer. "OH crap, now I've gotta have everyone over to drink all this stuff before my closet drowns in foam and glass shards."

In an effort to get some of them consumed quickly, I grabbed one of the 12pack boxes and took it to a friends'.



They're all a little undercarb'd. I figure they need another week till the green fades.

Has this happened to anyone else? Anyone get "The Gusher Scare?"

Nice how you took the bottles to your friend's house to explode there

And yea, I've totally had that happen. Look on the bright side, the true gushers like that are most likely dirty bottles. The black fuzzy gunk that's been living in the bottle is now in the beer, and it was nice enough to dump it so you didnt' have to drink it.

One bottle was overcarbed, the others undercarbed---you sure you mixed your priming solution into the beer adequately?

Yep, I had the priming solution at the bottom of the bottling bucket when I racked into it, and stirred a little as the bottling bucket began to fill.

It's only been a week and... tomorrow will be 2 weeks. I'm pretty sure it was a dirty bottle. I was careful this time too! Right after I bottled, I got a recommendation at my hombrew club to cut the handle off of an old bottle brush and stick the wire into a power drill. I'm totally doing that next time.

There was one thing I didn't mention. I had to move the carboy from a cabinet that was about four inches off the basement floor to a cabinet with no bottom. It sat on two magazines above a 60F floor for about a month and a week. It had two good weeks at about 65F initially. Could I guess that more yeast fell out of suspension than would have in a 68F, 1 month brew? Or is that totall whooey?