Exploding carboy!

A friend brewed for the first time Saturday at our local brew club's Teach A Friend To Brew session. His beer went into a glass carboy. Within 24 hours it exploded in his clothes closet. Sugary wort/beer and glass fragments over everything. He wasn't doing anything unusual. The krausen was filling the airlock.

Has anyone had a carboy blow up before? Did you figure out why?

That's bizarre. I'm surprised it didn't just blow out the stopper.

There must have been a fracture in the glass as normally these can hold a fair amount of pressure.

Mine blew on the kitchen countertop.

We estimated it covered 250 square feet.

That house reeked of beer till the day we left.

Glad it was a rental

Cheers,

knewshound

All I have to say is IMPERIAL RUSSIAN STOUT....

I have never heard of one blow before. I have had many blow the stopper and bubbler right out of the top.

Someone on Basic Brewing Radio had their carboy blow up on them because they had bent their blow-off tube so that gas couldn't escape through it.

Some of my carboys are 13 years old. Never had that problem.

knewshound said:

Mine blew on the kitchen countertop.

We estimated it covered 250 square feet.

That house reeked of beer till the day we left.

Glad it was a rental

Cheers,

knewshound

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Were you pouring hot wort into it?

The only thing I can really see making one of these explode is thermal expansion/contraction. If the glass is fairly cold, and you dump hot wort in... boom, it could shatter.

Pressure wise... the stopper would definatley blow first unless the glass is comprimised.

Yikes!

JoeRags said:

Pressure wise... the stopper would definatley blow first unless the glass is comprimised.

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I used to think the same thing. Just for ****s I did an experiment on this where I siphoned some of my wort into a 12 oz bottle with a sanitized stopper (no pressure relief). I expected the stopper to fly like a champagne cork, but it was definitely a bottle bomb.

Jack said:

I used to think the same thing. Just for ****s I did an experiment on this where I siphoned some of my wort into a 12 oz bottle with a sanitized stopper (no pressure relief). I expected the stopper to fly like a champagne cork, but it was definitely a bottle bomb.

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Wow... thats crazy... kinda scary too.

JoeRags said:

Wow... thats crazy... kinda scary too.

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Heh... I was reading about soda making and I figured that I could save some wort from right after pitching in the fridge to save as a starter for the next time... In a soda the yeast stops working at fridge temps... and I thought a stopper would be better than capping since if the pressure got too high, I'd just lose the cap, not the bottle.

It definitely didn't turn out the way I wanted!

I hadn't made any beer in 10 years. I decided to make some over the weekend and chose to use grains and dry malt extract for the first time. I asked some friends to help because I thought they had used grains before. It was a new experience for all of us. I knew as much about it as they did. In fact, more! They insisted we wire the stopper to the top of the carboy, like a champagne bottle, because they'd had one blow out before. (I wasn't so sure about doing that, but we did.) We placed it in a sink in the laundry room. With all the initial activity it forced some of the hops into the fermentation lock, but was still so active that I had to replenish the water every couple hours. That was until about 3:00AM this morning when the whole thing blew up! It was a time-bomb that took about 30 hours! What a mess...Glass and brew everywhere! I'm waiting for it to dry so I can clean it up.

Live and learn!

Starting another batch next weekend.

I can only imagine the sonic boom that explosion made. Your friends luck he wasn't grabbing a shirt out of the closet at that time.

I would be more believing that somthing in his closet fell onto it than the pressure of fermenting. It would be hard to believe that a normal glass carboy would blow before the stopper. Maybe mishandling the carboy from the club to the closet caused a fracture?

I had one "Cracksplode"... but it was not a violent explosion. Of course, this carboy had hot water in it with cold water pouring over it. Thermal shock to the system! Needless to say, it was a dumb n00b mistake and I am lucky nobody was burned.

crazy.. I've racked my beer using CO2 pressure before and didn't have any issues - I did blow a carboy cap off one time and that scared the bejeezus out of me