dealing with cider bottle bombs

[JJ900]

Hi All,
So I am on my 2nd batch of the 5 day country sweet cider from HBT. This cider gets bottled before its finished fermenting and you are supposed to check how quickly it carbs up in the bottle, and pasteurize it when sufficiently carbed but before it gets overcarbed.

This time, I checked it at about 9 hours after bottling and only a little pfft so I kept them going at room temp, checked again at about 19 hours and they are overflowing out of the bottle. Not crazy gushers but I lose about 1/5 of the liquid.

So now I am bringing the bottles down to fridge temp, then plan to open them to let out CO2 hoping they will not again overflow. If they do, I assume I would bring down closer to freezer temps and repeat the uncapping, and then recap, and pasteurize. Does this all sound correct?

When I uncap, do you think I need to leave the cap off e.g. for 10 seconds or so or does enough CO2 escape immediately?

thank you!

 

[Maylar]

Wild guess here, but I'd say you need to leave them uncapped for a while and maybe even stir them to release some CO2. I'm thinking of how opened bottles of soda stay carbonated for quite a while.

Good luck with it bro.

 

[JJ900]

Thanks Maylar! Likewise I was concerned about how if I lower the temp to fridge temps more CO2 will stay in solution and could that help keep it stay overcarbed.

So I ended up lowering them to 40F and uncapped usually for about 5-10 seconds, til the bubbles starting forming and heading for the top of the bottle neck. Then recapped. After doing that I reopened a couple just to see what another uncapping would do and no more CO2 tried to come out, which I hope is good news.

I was able to pasteurize with no broken bottles, though one of them was off-gasing, pressure forcing the cap up briefly, like a pressure cooker.