Help! Urgent! I forgot to pasteurize.

So I bottled some Graff with enough sugar to carbonate and sweeten, with a plastic bottle to check pressure. And forgot about them...until now. Started to stovetop pasteurize and just got to 110 degrees and 4 out of 10 blew. Panicked I started putting the rest in the frig and one blew in my face, just the cap.
What to do to save my loved ones, and my family?

 

If you forgot about them as they carbed, NEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVER attempt to pasteurize the bottles without checking how much carbonation they built up. That is asking for a trip to the ER at best, major surgery at worst. Additionally, make sure you follow the directions outlined in the stickied thread (dont heat the water with the bottles in the pot).

Second, if they had carbed for that long and had that much pressure, your best option is to either break seals and bleed off carbonation and forget about recarbing, OR, leave them in the fridge for several days, and drink them ice cold.

 

Why is it better to put bottles in hot water, than to slowly heat water and bottles?

If I put them in the frig, will they not ferment at all, anymore?

 

I am confused. What did you forget to pasteurize? The bottles before filling? Priming sugar solution?

 

At bottling I added enough sugar for priming and sweetening. Then forgot to check my tester, plastic bottle.

 

So you were trying to keep them from carbonating any more by pasteurizing?

 

Maybe try freezing them some then open.

 

The reason it's better to dunk them instead of them being in from the start is teh fact that you are not stressing the bottles by exposing their base to the far hotter bottom of the pan. The only way you could safely do it was if you were to put the pot in the oven where it will heat evenly over an extremely long time.

If you put them in the fridge, you're basically cold-crashing the cider and causing teh yeast to hibernate. They'll ferment until they get cold enough to do that, but it should be negligible compared to just how much they carbed already.

 

Or use a canning rack, which gets the bottles off the bottom of the pan and allows water to circulate below them.

 

Drink them before they all blow. I guess you could bottle in new bottles too.

 

Neither will work. Heat increases pressure, which will blow the over pressurized bottles.

 

You really missed the context by a wide margin. You never want to pasteurize bottles by having them IN contact with the pan as you heat the water because the bottom of the pan is in direct contact with the heating element and will have a higher temperature. That higher temperature can stress the bottles to breaking far faster than over-pressure.

 

Sure but he forgot about them, so they were probably over pressurized and whether he just warmed them your way or any way there is no telling if they will blow or not unless he knows how much pressure is already stored in them. So my point in the reply is for him to not pasteurize them at all (because he increases pressure), in the future he can use your way. But he certainly shouldn't try to, "save" his batch how you are describing. He should drink or re-bottle.

 

The only ways I suggested the OP to save his batch is to 1) break seals, bleed carb, then recarb if desired and pay attention this time, or 2) chill bottles in the fridge or wine cooler for a few days/weeks before drinking. Nowhere did I mention he should pasteurize his overcarbed bottles. That was never the context of the continued posts.

The discussion then moved on to why I said it's never a good idea to pasteurize bottles by having them in contact with the base of the pan and causing undo stress that can cause the botttles to burst. This is the context, as the OP was attempting to pasteurize bottles by doing just that. So I suggested to use the dunk method outlined in the stove-top pasteurizing sticky thread. Ong then replied saying that if you have a canning rack (kept trying to type 'racking cane'), you can potentially have bottles in at the start. Both methods properly work when the bottles are appropriately carbonated or still.