cork shot off conditioning bottle

I have a belgian dark strong that I bottled a dozen in corked 750ml bottles. They are currently resting on their sides at room temp where they have been for the past 4 months. Yesterday i come home from work to a wonderful beer smell. Look around and one of the bottles popped. The cork shot off and left the cage in tact, beer everywhere. Is this due to overcarbonating, or poor corking/caging? I'm going to stand them upright and try to keep them cool (conditioning temp) now that they are carbonated. I was planning on giving the corked bottles out for xmas...sucks for whoevers that one was. Anyway, this ever happen to anyone else?

You'll want to leave them on their sides until maybe a week before serving them. This will keep the corks wet

As for your rocket cork...need a bit more info.

Was your FG steady? How much sugar did you add to carb, and what size batch?

And this may sound stupid but it happens often... did you use the right corks and corker? Belgian corks are completely different from wine and champagne corks. Did you fully tighten down the cages (more than just finger tight)? I usually use a pen or pencil to twist the wire until its extremely well tightened.

FG was steady. It's a 5 gallon batch. FG was around 1.019 I think, maybe a couple points higher. It was definitely done though. It had been in secondary for a couple months before bottling. I can't remember how much priming sugar I added, but I calculated it to get around 3-3.2 vols co2. I also added some US-05. About half a packet into the bucket. I used belgian corks with a corker, and used a pen with the cages. I'm thinking this one just had a little more sugar than the rest. The ones I bottled in regular bottles are fine so it's hopefully just a freak bottle. This was my first corked batch, and maybe this bottle was the first one I did and didn't do as good of a job on it or something. Cross my fingers for the others.

You're probably right. It's possible the priming sugar didn't get mixed evenly.

schristian619 said:

The cork shot off and left the cage in tact, beer everywhere.

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If the cork shot off and the cage was intact, something's terribly wrong--either you're putting the cages on wrong, or it was a broken cage to start with, or something.

With a properly installed cage, there's really no way for the cork to shoot off without removing or breaking the cage.