I had a similar experience with my first brew. It was a VERY violent ferment and I was using a borrowed glass carboy. The sediment kinda' blocked the valve and then the pressure popped the rubber stopper out, spraying beer-smelling orange and lemon zest bits all over the walls/ceiling of my dining room. My wife started trying to wipe off the walls a bit, while I tried to figure out what to do next, because foam was leaking all down the side. I put the stopper back in and pressed it down as hard as I could, not yet realizing the valve was clogged. About a minute later, the stopper blew out with much more force and sprayed zestbits all over my wife, the walls, the ceiling, and a bookshelf covered in small hard-to-clean trinkets.
:
I panicked and moved the carboy outside, causing it to slosh around a bit. When I got outside, I called my buddy who got me into brewing in the first place and he called our friend, the Rainman of Home Brewing. They adivsed me to go with the hose into a bucket with a bit of water/alcohol in it. Like I said before, I was borrowing another guy's equipment, so I went through and found a hose the right size for the stopper. It had some kind of clip-thing towards the end, but it fit in the stopper so I set it all up.
I had the bright idea of cutting two thin pieces of wood so that one would fit around the neck of the carboy and the other would go on top of the stopper but fit around the hose that was now running to the bucket. I then clamped the pieces of wood together on the sides...after all, I didn't want the stopper blowing out and outside air getting inside my first batch of golden goodness.
There was a very steady stream of foam pushing out of the tube into the bucket. Another friend was at the house helping me and said something about the clip on the hose, but my attention was entirely focused on my wife covered in beer explosion goo and the state of our walls/house.
We wrapped an old towel around the carboy to prevent light from ruining the fermentation and left the house, because we were already late meeting someone.
When I got home and looked out on the back patio, the towel-wrapped-carboy was 1/2 as tall as it was when we left. Does glass shrink? No. It actually exploded the carboy and would have thrown glass all over my backyard and broken/injured god knows what else, but the towel held it together enough. I had a 5-galon beer puddle in the yard, and the whole area smelled like frat party, which didn't subside for another couple weeks.
Can you believe my wife still let me get into beer brewing after that? (And got me a kegging system for Christmas about 2 months later...)
She's a keeper!
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