Foam Fountain?

So my IPA (first brew) has been bottled for about two weeks and the 12oz bottles are very nicely carbed and the beer is delicious. So last night a popped my first grolsch bottled and it was carbed pretty well too. So tonight I brought up a second grolsch and planned on drinking that too! It was cool from my basement but not refrigerated. So I was planning on pouring a small glass, then throwing it in the fridge for an hour before I came back to it. When I popped the lid is popped with a lot of force and almost immediately I had a continuous fountain of foam coming out of the bottle. I tried pouring out some of the beer into the glass so it would stop pouring out but it just continued until I resealed it. why did that happen? Was it just because it wasn't cold or was the beer over carbed or what?

A few possibilities:
1) a "gusher" infection. Wild yeast or bacteria that will ferment it down further.
2) overcarbonation due to excess priming sugar. Did you dissolve it in boiling water and then combine with the beer?
3) crud in the bottle. Either through poor cleaning, or poor racking. Can create nucleation sites for the c02 to rush out of solution
4) agitation of the bottle. Sediment gets stirred up, leading to same as #3.

I started putting a paint strainer bag on my racking cane, especially if I dry hopped, which seems to have cut way down on sediment-related gushers.

OK thanks for the input. I considered a gusher type infection but wouldn't I have already knows that and the other bottles? As far as the priming sugar goes I used 5 ounces in a 5 gallon batch and I did dissolve the sugar in water before adding it to the beer. I was worried that might be a little bit much but again I didn't have problems with the other bottles. As far as cleaning went it was a brand new bottle and I did clean it and then sanitize it. Maybe the most likely culprit was agitating the bottle, I did jar it before I opened it.

It was cool from my basement but not refrigerated.

Click to expand...

You need to put the beer in the fridge for a minimum of 24 hours. The reason it gushed is that the CO2 was not absorbed into the brew. Opening a brew that has not been refrigerated will always foam up.

Refrigerating the bottle will allow more CO2 to stay in solution. Maybe a combination of this and the agitating of the bottle caused your problem.

you could have also just had some contamination in that one bottle, not the whole batch.

OK cool, thanks everybody