smallbatch
Member
I just experienced the perfect storm, culminating in the explosion of my first bottle bomb...
I happened to be in the kitchen tonight, prepping to bottle a 1 gallon batch of Pale Ale and 1 gallon batch of ESB when an explosion occurred behind me. It wasn't earth shattering or terribly frightening (though I don't doubt that they can be) but it got my attention. I turned to see beer pouring out of the cabinet where I store my homebrew. Opening the door, I saw the top half of three bottles missing and foaming beer continuing to pour to the ground. Inside each of those bottles were the fruits of my first 5 gallon all-grain batch of beer - a Dusseldorf Alt.
Below, I'll outline the chain of events that lead to this somber occasion in the hope that others may learn from it and that I may achieve some measure of healing in the process (because a test bottle I opened after the fact turned out to be excellent - even at room temperature - and I'm afraid I won't be able to ever taste them in their full glory).
First, I borrowed the all-grain equipment from my homebrew club to experience brewing a full - homebrew - scale beer (5 gallons). Since I had previously brewed a pretty good alt, I figured I'd give it another try since my normal go-to's (pale ale, bitter, scottish) were already sitting in carboys. Unfortunately the brew session prior, the cylinder my hydrometer came in - which doubled as my measuring tube - finally gave in and I hadn't yet gotten to buying a proper replacement. This kept me from measuring the OG I had achieved in this completely alien system. As some may imagine, this lack of knowledge will play a crucial role later.
Next, those of you familiar with your styles - though I'm not a scholar in them myself - know that an alt is about as close as an ale gets to the clean, crispness of a lager. It's a cool fermenting ale whose yeast take their time, have pretty low attenuation and flocculation. My previous alt was brewed without any knowledge of the style and used the fast fermenting, highly attenuative, highly flocculant Nottingham yeast from Danstar. Trying to be true to the style this time, in addition to using White Labs' Dusseldorf Alt yeast, I employed a swamp cooler to keep temperatures as low as possible (not having proper temperature control yet). After about a week, fermentation had slowed considerably and I moved it into a new closet out of the swamp cooler setup (it was starting to smell moldy). There it sat for another week at room temperature before bottling.
Prior to bottling, I had continued to learn more about brewing the style and became more concerned that I wasn't just imagining the bubbling sounds I thought I occasionally heard coming from the closet. This lead me to test the gravity the night before my intended bottling session and found it to be spot on with BeerSmith's expected FG for the batch. To follow that up, the FG reading just prior to bottling hadn't changed noticeably, so I felt pretty good. Unfortunately it had been less than 24 hours and my eyes aren't exactly precision instruments.
Finally, I have a habit of keeping the last, half-full bottle of my batches. If you hadn't noticed by now, I'm kind of a cheap skate and hate to lose even those last 6 oz. of beer. Well, over the next few days as I happened to see my alt conditioning, I noticed this half-full bottle with a bit of foam on the edge of the surface of the beer. I thought it was weird and possibly an indication of over-carbonation, but I didn't worry about it too much (apparently not enough).
So, it turns out all - or maybe just some - of these factors conspired to cause that half-full bottle (presumably) to explode and take out 2 of its neighbors. To summarize:
My inability to confidently determine the completeness of fermentation (partly through lack of knowledge of the OG) of my first cool-ly and slowly fermenting ale lead to the explosion of a half-full bottle of my first 5-gallon all-grain batch.
I have now opened and allowed all the remaining bottles to foam over to completion, re-capped them, and put them in the refrigerator for consumption at my earliest convenience. Hopefully they come out well, because I think they have great potential. Luckily, I transferred about 1 gallon of the beer prior to bottling to a small glass jug and have been lagering it as an experiment to see how much this recommended process (for the style) will affect the outcome, so all is not lost.
So what are the lessons to learn from this? Hopefully you've taken away a few of your own, but for me I've learned that I need to pay more attention to that "brewer's intuition" and make sure the gravities are rock steady before bottling any beer that those senses tell me might not be ready, not to mention putting more emphasis on getting an OG to be able to anticipate any deviation I might achieve from the expected. Also, I need to break the habit of keeping those half-full bottles. The remainder of my brews tonight, I just dumped into a glass and have been savoring as I type. Room temperature and flat, but I'm pretty excited about how they'll come out.
I happened to be in the kitchen tonight, prepping to bottle a 1 gallon batch of Pale Ale and 1 gallon batch of ESB when an explosion occurred behind me. It wasn't earth shattering or terribly frightening (though I don't doubt that they can be) but it got my attention. I turned to see beer pouring out of the cabinet where I store my homebrew. Opening the door, I saw the top half of three bottles missing and foaming beer continuing to pour to the ground. Inside each of those bottles were the fruits of my first 5 gallon all-grain batch of beer - a Dusseldorf Alt.
Below, I'll outline the chain of events that lead to this somber occasion in the hope that others may learn from it and that I may achieve some measure of healing in the process (because a test bottle I opened after the fact turned out to be excellent - even at room temperature - and I'm afraid I won't be able to ever taste them in their full glory).
First, I borrowed the all-grain equipment from my homebrew club to experience brewing a full - homebrew - scale beer (5 gallons). Since I had previously brewed a pretty good alt, I figured I'd give it another try since my normal go-to's (pale ale, bitter, scottish) were already sitting in carboys. Unfortunately the brew session prior, the cylinder my hydrometer came in - which doubled as my measuring tube - finally gave in and I hadn't yet gotten to buying a proper replacement. This kept me from measuring the OG I had achieved in this completely alien system. As some may imagine, this lack of knowledge will play a crucial role later.
Next, those of you familiar with your styles - though I'm not a scholar in them myself - know that an alt is about as close as an ale gets to the clean, crispness of a lager. It's a cool fermenting ale whose yeast take their time, have pretty low attenuation and flocculation. My previous alt was brewed without any knowledge of the style and used the fast fermenting, highly attenuative, highly flocculant Nottingham yeast from Danstar. Trying to be true to the style this time, in addition to using White Labs' Dusseldorf Alt yeast, I employed a swamp cooler to keep temperatures as low as possible (not having proper temperature control yet). After about a week, fermentation had slowed considerably and I moved it into a new closet out of the swamp cooler setup (it was starting to smell moldy). There it sat for another week at room temperature before bottling.
Prior to bottling, I had continued to learn more about brewing the style and became more concerned that I wasn't just imagining the bubbling sounds I thought I occasionally heard coming from the closet. This lead me to test the gravity the night before my intended bottling session and found it to be spot on with BeerSmith's expected FG for the batch. To follow that up, the FG reading just prior to bottling hadn't changed noticeably, so I felt pretty good. Unfortunately it had been less than 24 hours and my eyes aren't exactly precision instruments.
Finally, I have a habit of keeping the last, half-full bottle of my batches. If you hadn't noticed by now, I'm kind of a cheap skate and hate to lose even those last 6 oz. of beer. Well, over the next few days as I happened to see my alt conditioning, I noticed this half-full bottle with a bit of foam on the edge of the surface of the beer. I thought it was weird and possibly an indication of over-carbonation, but I didn't worry about it too much (apparently not enough).
So, it turns out all - or maybe just some - of these factors conspired to cause that half-full bottle (presumably) to explode and take out 2 of its neighbors. To summarize:
My inability to confidently determine the completeness of fermentation (partly through lack of knowledge of the OG) of my first cool-ly and slowly fermenting ale lead to the explosion of a half-full bottle of my first 5-gallon all-grain batch.
I have now opened and allowed all the remaining bottles to foam over to completion, re-capped them, and put them in the refrigerator for consumption at my earliest convenience. Hopefully they come out well, because I think they have great potential. Luckily, I transferred about 1 gallon of the beer prior to bottling to a small glass jug and have been lagering it as an experiment to see how much this recommended process (for the style) will affect the outcome, so all is not lost.
So what are the lessons to learn from this? Hopefully you've taken away a few of your own, but for me I've learned that I need to pay more attention to that "brewer's intuition" and make sure the gravities are rock steady before bottling any beer that those senses tell me might not be ready, not to mention putting more emphasis on getting an OG to be able to anticipate any deviation I might achieve from the expected. Also, I need to break the habit of keeping those half-full bottles. The remainder of my brews tonight, I just dumped into a glass and have been savoring as I type. Room temperature and flat, but I'm pretty excited about how they'll come out.
