Bursting bottles: Urban Legend or yeah, it can happen?

[fuelish]

Never had bombs, guess others have, had my first batch of mead pop a few bottle caps (refrigerated the rest of the batch immediately, and they were bad gushers......this on my first mead attempt, hey, I was a beerbrrewer and figured surely this mead stuff is done fermenting...guess it wasn't...heh) Am MUCH more patient now, no problems since....don't even brew anymore, just make mead solely, and, of course, time is your friend....and MORE time is your BEST friend

 

[SilverZero]

I've had one batch throw a couple of bombs (literally exploded) but at least they were in cardboard boxes in the laundry room. Heard a few pops during the night that sounded not quite like breaking glass in the moment, but maybe in retrospect. Found a couple of shards on the floor the next morning that had made it through the handle holes in the boxes. The bottles themselves (2 or 3 total) were blown in half. These were amber bottles from Deschutes Brewery. I never dumped anything from that batch, but I chilled them very well before opening. Can't remember if they were gushers.

I've also been struggling with gushers in other batches lately. It's inconsistent which bottles will go, some are almost flat and some are geysers. A few will just foam up and foam and foam until the bottle is empty. I stir the priming sugar really well, so I've got something else going on. I haven't thought about it much since I moved to kegging, but if it's a sanitation issue I should probably give it some consideration. I'm rebuilding my brewery at the moment, so hopefully I'll get rid of anything hiding in the system.

One of the local breweries here in Bend had a recall last year of one of their distributed batches due to overcarbing. They published a whole safety procedure on how to dispose of bottles if you didn't want to return them to the brewery.

 

[WichitaBrewer]

A few months ago, I had some bottles of my first couple of attempted beers, still, so I wanted to see if they were any good. The first couple of Oatmeal Stouts gushed pretty bad, and smelled like sour cherry pie. When I got to the third or fourth, the cap came blasting off and beer flew onto the ceiling, kitchen cabinets, the fridge and floor behind me, etc.. I took the rest of the bottles out to the backyard, pointed them away from me, and opened them. One made a large popping noise and the cap flew over the fence and I could hear it hit my neighbor's house.

I keg now, so I'm going to be mostly doing that.. But when I do bottle, I'll definitely be opening them at a regular enough interval to make sure they aren't infected.