Beer Foam

When I pour my homebrew, I get a nice head of foam, approx. 1/2 inch, but there is always a few bottles out of the batch that when poured, produce massive amounts of foam. In these bottles, I would say up to 50 percent of the glass ends up filling with beer foam. So far, I haven' noticed any difference in flavor between the two.

Anyone have any suggestions as to why this happens?? Has anyone else had this happen?

My theories are contamination, or for some strange reason there are different concentrations of yeast and sugar in some bottles that produce more carbonation.

I can think of two possible reasons: uneven priming sugar distribution or differences in pouring technique.

- magno

One thing that can cause this to happen, too, is not refrigerating long enough. If you stick one in the fridge, and open it in an hour, the CO2 doesn't seem to be dissolved in the beer as well as one that's been in the fridge a couple of days. Then, I get way more foam than usual.

My guess, though, is that the priming solution wasn't equally distributed when you bottled. It probably isn't contamination if everything else is ok.

Lorena

Yeah good advice from the above posters. You'll know a gusher infection when you see one. It just keeps coming out of the bottle and won't hardly stop once you open it. I had a batch of cider that I bottled and had run out of bottles and used a growler that I had around. Well I think I forgot to rinse it with sanitizer. I opened it and it just kept running out, it took forever to stop. I had the same thing happen with varying carbonation and lean towards the inconsistent distribution of the priming solution as the culprit.