Help Bottle Bombs!!!!

Just had a bottle bomb go off while laying in bed. I need to get back to sleep but don't want more going off tonight (or ever). luckily they were in my closet.

What should I do about the remaining bottles? Fridge? Outside on my balcony? plastic trash bags?

Fridge in a paper bag.

Tomorrow you can uncap or do whatever

Chilling is a good idea. You can also open the bottles, release some pressure, then recap.

do i need to be careful handling them? will the fridge take care of it?

I need something for tonight. its after midnight here, and I have a quiz at 8am this morning. My number one concern is getting the ones out of my living room so my kittens don't get hit, but I am concerned about moving them. If they are exploding when they are still won't moving them make them go off?

One way or another you're going have to move them eventually. You could cover the cases with some towels and plastic bags. Or just take a bottle opener to the cases and open each one carefully to relieve the pressure.

Be careful moving them. shaking them could agitate them more. Put them in the fridge and as they chill they shouldnt pop anymore.

Tomorrow you can uncap , let still for a few hours, then recalculate your bottling sugar and recap

Thank you guys so much for the quick help.

The explosion happened in my closet just a couple feet away from me and it was very loud. My gf thought that someone had shot through the window.

All bottles got put in the fridge safely, glass and beer still everywhere in the closet, but thats going to have to wait til morning.

I'll post all the info about what I did tomorrow, and maybe some pics of the closet. I really have no idea what went wrong.

Now I'm off to bed with the lingering smell of a Double Chocolate Stout in the air.

Did you take gravity readings before bottling?

Wakadaka said:

Thank you guys so much for the quick help.

The explosion happened in my closet just a couple feet away from me and it was very loud. My gf thought that someone had shot through the window.

All bottles got put in the fridge safely, glass and beer still everywhere in the closet, but thats going to have to wait til morning.

I'll post all the info about what I did tomorrow, and maybe some pics of the closet. I really have no idea what went wrong.

Now I'm off to bed with the lingering smell of a Double Chocolate Stout in the air.

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Luckily you didn't end up with a chain reaction (first one goes and shock causes adjacent ones to blow). Although that would have been way more exciting to post about, and one helluva story.

I store all of my bottles while they are conditioning in a big plastic container. It's about 2.5 feet by 1.5 feet and two feet high. It easily holds 50 bottles upright.

I give the box a few real good shakes before handling them that way they will explode in there before they do in my hand.

I dealt with over-pressurized bottles of imperial stout by gently venting the caps without removing them. I did it a few times a day for about 5 days until the pressure seemed more or less normal. Purged the O2 out of the headspace, that's for sure! I hit all the bottles with my wing capper just to convince myself that my gentle venting hadn't distorted the caps and ruined their seal. Well, that was over a year ago and my random tastes of the remaining bottles show no signs of oxidation and the carb is perfect. If you find your non-exploded bottles are over-pressurized, I highly recommend venting (not recapping) them.

I put my bottles in a milk crate, holds about 24-25. That goes in to a plastic storage tub with a towel over the milk crates. Bottle bombs will contained in the tub. I have 3-4 milk crates stacked, conditioning in each plastic tub.
No bombs so far, but I think this is a pretty good system.

Bottle bombs are easily avoided. Just be sure that: 1) fermentation is done before bottling and 2) don't over prime. If you do that, you won't need to be concerned about bottle bombs.

Thanks for all the responses.

This bottle was only from my third batch, and I am pretty sure I did everything right.

AHS Double Chocolate Stout. Brewed 2/25/11, bottled 3/20/11 (23 days in primary). OG was 1.056 FG 1.013. Used the 4.5 oz of included priming sugar. Boiled in 2 cups of water put it in sanitized bottling bucket and siphoned on top of it. The tubing was positioned on the side of the bucket in a way that creates a slight whirlpool. I used a White Labs London Ale yeast. Everything was sanitized with Star-San.

So it was sitting in bottles for 2 weeks before it exploded, which I found to be surprising. My guess would be it was either an infected bottle, unevenly distributed priming sugar, or possibly increase in temperature. Yesterday was very warm here compared to what the weather has been like. Over 80 outside, but inside my apartment it stayed around 72, which is cooler than it has been inside the past couple of weeks.

I read in a different thread that someone should smell the broken glass for an infection. Would it be that apparent? If so its definitely not an infection, because I was there when it exploded, and got beer on my hands when moving it to the fridge, and it smelt good. However, I know that hops help to fight off infections, and this only had 1oz galena for 60 minutes and then cocoa powder at 5 minutes.

It could have been unevenly mixed, but its the same process I have always done, and it seems that is what most people do.

The whole batch was bottled in 12 oz bottles.

Any ideas on what went wrong? What to do with the bottles sitting in the fridge? Let me know if you need more information

Anybody have any ideas?

It could be possible that the particular bottle that exploded had a flaw or weakness. Was it a new bottle or did you reuse bottles. Seems unlikely but a possibility. In the past ive very gently stired my bottling bucket to ensure an even distribution of the sugar.

DubBrew beat me to it. I was thinking maybe the one bottle in particular was weak. Why not pop open another and see how the carbonation is for the heck of it? Of course, it could be any of the other things you mentioned. I always give the beer a gentle stir with a sanitized spoon before bottling just to make sure the sugar is evenly dispersed. I know many don't do this and never have any problems, but I'd rather be on the safe side.


Rev.

Everything sounds right. I'm gonna go with uneven mixing of the sugar (maybe a clump?), too much head space in the bottle, or a weakened bottle.

How many 12 oz. bottles did you fill? If the batch was not the full 5 gallons and you added the 4.5 oz. of priming sugar that would make a difference. It would only really matter if you had 4 or less gallons total.

Many beer bottles from high production breweries are making more "1-time use" beer bottles that are thin and even recapping them at home can cause them to break. Hold several empty bottles up to the light and you can see some are much thinner that others. I would blame the bottle unless you have lots of high pressure in the rest of the batch.

Wait, I've always wanted to be "that guy":

>This is why you should keg!<


[snicker]


Seriously, it sounds like you did everything alright, and I would tentatively suspect it was an isolated bottle issue. When I bottled everything it seemed like almost every batch had one crazy, almost explosive gusher. I think I narrowly escaped bottle bombs many times. I always chalked up to that "one" bottle that didn't get as clean as it should, or maybe it got a little too much sugar.

I got 48 or 49 bottles, so thats about 4.5 gallons. It was a reused bottle (as all of them are).

Its a St. Pauli Girl lager originally. Anybody known these to have problems? I have a ton of them because my gf really likes them

I had a 22 oz. Krusovice bottle which blew up when all the other beers were fine. The glass was just really thin. SWMBO won't let me bottle carb in the bedroom anymore. Now I keep them in a hard plastic container in an out of the way place.

so i just opened 2 of them and they were not overly carbonated by any means. no foam. a slight hiss as i popped them. I am going to take them out of the fridge and put them in cardboard boxes within plastic trash bags.

Sound good?

Wakadaka said:

so i just opened 2 of them and they were not overly carbonated by any means. no foam. a slight hiss as i popped them. I am going to take them out of the fridge and put them in cardboard boxes within plastic trash bags.

Sound good?

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I think if you can afford the space you may as well just leave them in the fridge, otherwise, the boxes should be good.

won't leaving them in the fridge stop the conditioning process? I don't want to end up with two cases of bad beer, but then again I don't want them to all be bottle bombs either.

I am hoping that it was just one isolated bad bottle, but I guess I will just have to wait and see.

Wakadaka said:

won't leaving them in the fridge stop the conditioning process? I don't want to end up with two cases of bad beer, but then again I don't want them to all be bottle bombs either.

I am hoping that it was just one isolated bad bottle, but I guess I will just have to wait and see.

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They're obviously already carbed. Unless you are unsatisfied with your currrent level of carbonation or are trying to age them or something like that you should be able to leave them in the fridge.

Yeah I guess that the other bottles that I opened to see if they were over carbonated didn't appear to be. No foam coming out or anything like that. Seemed to be exactly what I would expect at 2 weeks in bottles.

They are boxed and bagged in my shower right now, so if they start exploding they are going back in the fridge

One more thing.

I would recommend letting them sit in the fridge for a while before opening them (at least overnight). If they are overcarbonated this will reduce the likelyhood of gushers a bit (CO2 dissolves fairly slowly).

Yea, thanks for the heads up. I usually try to stick a bunch of beer in the fridge on Tuesdays or so for the weekend. I want to start cooling them for longer, but if their is beer in the fridge it gets drank pretty quickly

but if their is beer in the fridge it gets drank pretty quickly

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I understand

So the first bottle exploded on monday, its now thursday, and no more have exploded. I am assuming that it was just a bad bottle. I put them in the fridge monday night because I didn't want to deal with anything else. Tuesday I opened 2 and neither seemed over carbonated. Recapped those put them all in boxes in my bathroom, and none have exploded