Bottle Bomb

[Slipgate]

I've never had a single bottle of beer explode, but was wondering if it is dangerous? How explosive is it? Does it blow glass everywhere?

The closest I had was a bottle of stout that completely turned to foam the instant I opended it, every last drop. So my guess was that bottle was close to exploding.

A good experiment would be to intentionally overcarb a beer and then set up a camera on it to capture it exploding. Anyone want to take on that project???

 

[Loweface]

Never had one myself. From what I gather they usually either blow in the press or more dangerously as they are opened. There have been a few warnings here showing cut hands from opening one.

Looking for that thread I found this pic courtesy of BigKahuna

Someone will show you the thread with the badly cut hand...

 

[Loweface]

Oh and I had a look on youtube...

[youtube]4cf10vcFCck&hl[/youtube]

[youtube]Kuv8F4uORA8[/youtube]

 

[Special Hops]

I've had two growlers explode. After the second one I had enough and built the kegorator.

They were in the pantry and beer and glass got everywhere. ***** to clean up. I am sure if you are standing right next to or even holding one it could be dangerous

 

[Evan]

i let my bottles carb up in the winter in an extra room. then move them to the basement, but i was moving a bunch when i just noticed one bottle had cracks down the sides. i dont know how close it was, i just took it outside and put it in the trash and closed the lid right after it haha.

all the more reason to just keg...

 

[BigKahuna]

Never had one myself. From what I gather they usually either blow in the press or more dangerously as they are opened. There have been a few warnings here showing cut hands from opening one.

Looking for that thread I found this pic courtesy of BigKahuna

Someone will show you the thread with the badly cut hand...

Yes...That was not one of my finer moments in Brewing.

 

[malkore]

I had a stout that I bottled too early out of impatience. after about 5 weeks, one bottle blew, and it took out 5 bottles around it.

i chilled the remaining 45 bottles for a day and when I opened them, they all gushed 2/3 of their contents out.

that batch and the wheat I totally screwed up after it is why I stuck to mead for a long time.

Now I brew mead and beer with much success and praise from my friends.

 

[Loweface]

Yes...That was not one of my finer moments in Brewing.

Don't worry about it... You've had many many more finer moments than I have... (Yet)

You just seem to be the only person who tagged a picture with "bottle bomb"... Though theres probably many more...

 

[fratermus]

I've never had a single bottle of beer explode, but was wondering if it is dangerous? How explosive is it? Does it blow glass everywhere?

I've popped a couple over the years. The recent one was a beer I only half-filled because it was all that was left in the bottling bucket. I did that as an experiment, and it popped. I used a heineken greenie for that because I wasn't intending to age/drink it so no harm done. It did not injure any nearby bottles.

It was in an enclosed space so I cannot comment on the shrapnel radius of damage...

 

[Quan]

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I created the perfect bottle bombs once and thought it'd be prudent to share my story. Holy crap was it scary.

I harvested some yeast from an IPA, I just put yeast from the bottom of my primary into some 22oz bottles and threw them in the fridge to deal with later. I decided I needed the bottles and didn't feel like going through the trouble of washing the yeast so I pulled them out of the fridge with intent to open them and dump them. Well, for some reason, I decided to do all this WHILE I was packing to go on a weekend trip. Guess what happened? I forgot them on the counter for the whole weekend. I left three 22 oz bottles full of yeast and beer in 72°F.

When I got home, what had gone down was down right SCARY. The bottles had completely "disappeared." What I mean by this is that there was no recognizable bottle "shapes" left... only glass shrapnel. No big chunks like BigKahuna's Grolsch bottle. The bottles had genuinely exploded and covered every square inch of my 500ish sq. foot kitchen/living room area in glass shrapnel. The aluminum blinds next to the bottles had holes blown through them from the explosion. The dry wall close by had glass shards embedded in it. My bench bottle capper which was about a foot away had two chunks of plastic broken off of it and shot half way across the room. The scariest part was a big leafy plant I had probably 20 feet away from the bottles had holes through the leaves. That means glass shrapnel hit it with enough force from 20ft away to actually blow through the leaves (not just land on them). On top of all of this, all this glass shrapnel was glued to the floor with dryed up, sticky, yeast/beer.

I would NOT have wanted to be around when they blew. I still find pieces of glass every once in a while.

I have since moved to kegging for fear of this ever happening again. But before I moved to kegging, I always kept any aging bottles in cardboard boxes inside of a Coleman cooler just in case of bombs and none ever blew. Figures that the one time I don't have them contained, they blow. Sounds like that's what everyone else does so all the other explosions have happened in enclosed spaces, which is obviously, a good thing. This is just an illustration of the dangers of not having them in some kind of container.

 

[BubbaK]

I'm expecting a few bottle bombs from this last batch I just bottled.. It has fought me the entire way of the brewing process. Its gonna go out with a bang I'm sure. I quarantined 2 bottles and enclosed the other 2 cases in plastic bins with lids..