Bottle bomb question

Recently I brewed a Two Hearted clone. It was great. The recipe called for 1oz dry hops. I added the dry hops directly to fermenter (no muslin bag). When it was time to bottle a fair amount of hops and trub made it into my bottling bucket.

No problem though. The first 40+ bottles seemed not to get any hops bits. The last 3 bottles got a significant amount of floating hops bits in the bottles. I marked the caps of these 3 bottles intending them to only be drank by me. I didn't want to serve my friends beer with floating hops bits. The hops sank in the bottles in about a week.

Now I have drank all but about 6 of these beers. They were great. Perfect carbonation (about 1 finger head throughout drinking the glass). Except for these last 3 which were marked as having hops in the bottle. I opened them all yesterday. All 3 were bottle bombs. I poured each of them after the explosion (about 40% remained). They smelled great but had tons of yeast chunks after the pressure release. I looked in the bottle after rinsing and the bottle was clean. I have had bottle bombs before from using an unclean bottle. Those usually have black spots (maybe bits of decomposed label) that needs a bottle brush to remove. These bottles looked great, no black spots. PS. I don't get lots of bottle bombs but over the years have had a few here and there.

When I bottled these I was being greedy. I wanted every last bit of beer bottled. I think these 3 bottles may have also gotten a significant amount of flocculated yeast in them.

Any ideas what could have caused these bottle bombs? I am thinking maybe decomposing hops or decomposing yeast. But, I really don't know.

Thanks!

Recipe here: http://www.brewmasterswarehouse.com/recipe/cb9f6102/shoultzmeyer-brewery-third-date-ipa

It sounds like maybe your priming sugar was not fully mixed into your beer. As these last bottles had a bunch of trub in them, maybe the priming sugar concentration was a little higher also, leading to over carbonation.

cervezarara said:

It sounds like maybe your priming sugar was not fully mixed into your beer. As these last bottles had a bunch of trub in them, maybe the priming sugar concentration was a little higher also, leading to over carbonation.

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I gently stir in the priming sugar (after boiling in 1 cup water) and then let the beer sit 20-30 minutes before bottling. So, my guess is that is now what happened. All the other bottles had very consistent carbonation. Usually when I don't stir I get some bottles with light carb some with lots of carb but never any bottle bombs.

Increased surface area provided by the hop particulates may have given co2 bubbles a place to form, creating an extra vigorous release, though thats a lot of guessing and operating off of ideas I seem to remember hearing in a general chemistry class three years ago.

edit: also it may just be that enough time passed that the priming sugar all got chomped and therefore more co2 was produced.

I suspect the others would have eventually gone this way too. Probably too much priming sugar, or bottling a little too soon, giving you a high carbonation. Couple that with the hops (providing nucleation points for the CO2 to come out of solution), and you get a gusher.

I just want to point out, a bottle bomb is a bottle that actually explodes shooting glass fragments everywhere (very dangerous). These were just gushers.

hops could have also harbored some extra sugar that didn't go into solution until after being bottled

If these were just gushers, it sounds like the hop particles may have just been acting as nucleation points for the CO2.

The whole issue of priming sugar not properly mixing is very unlikely if you use corn sugar in 1-2 cups of water.

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I had the exact same issue with a dry hopped batch, hop particles in the last two bottles.
I would say its not a priming sugar issue, but a hop particle issue, as we both did it.

Lemon said:

I had the exact same issue with a dry hopped batch, hop particles in the last two bottles.
I would say its not a priming sugar issue, but a hop particle issue, as we both did it.

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Ah-ha it happened to someone else. Thanks.

Calder said:

I just want to point out, a bottle bomb is a bottle that actually explodes shooting glass fragments everywhere (very dangerous). These were just gushers.

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Okay. Thanks. They were gushers not bottle bombs. So many terms, so little time.

+1 to nucleation points. If all the other bottles were properly carbonated, then you probably did enough mixing to evenly distribute the sugar solution, the the hop bits are probably just giving a ton of tiny spots for bubbles to form.