Isolated bottle bomb?

[TripleC223]

I think I may have just found my first bottle bomb this morning and am looking for some advice about what to do.

This morning I went to move some bottles from the closet to the fridge, since it had been two weeks since bottling. When I opened the box, I found one bottle shattered; I can't confirm that it actually exploded from internal pressure, but I haven't moved the box much at all, so that's my assumption. The break appears to have occurred in the middle of the bottle. I don't know at what point the bottle in question broke, as all the beer had already dried.

The rest of the bottles are all intact. I've sampled this beer at various stages, and up to the most recent sample (10 days after bottling), I still would have considered it undercarbed.

This was a smaller batch (3 gallons) that fermented from 1.052 all the way down to 1.004 with US-05. It held at 1.004 for a full week, so it was done. Note that I probably overpitched the yeast, which was rinsed from a previous 3-gallon batch and split into two. It has tasted fine so far, dare I even say "good." I bottled an estimated 2.8 gallons with 2.3 oz. of table sugar, giving it 2.4 CO2 volumes. It has been conditioning at room temp, somewhere in the 66-72 range.

I'd prefer not to dump the beer. Could this be an instance of a weak bottle, a lone infected bottle, poor priming sugar mixing, or something else?

 

[Sailingeric]

I have had two random bottle bombs, one in the first week of carbing and another batch several months later and I attribute it to weak bottles. I could wait and see if you get any more but if not already in a plastic bin, I would put them into them in there to keep the mess contained.

 

[tgolanos]

Had this happen once with a hefe. One bottle out of a batch of 24 cracked cleanly at the bottom, no shattering or exploding. All the other bottles were fine after a few days in the fridge with perfect carbonation. I chalked it up to one defective bottle.

Take some precautions like putting your bottles in a plastic tub and put some in the fridge. If you get any more iffy ones, start drinking fast.

 

[bucketnative]

IF you had a single bottle that wasn't cleaned and sanitized properly, a one-off infection could definitely cause that. I had a set of six bottles that somehow missed the clean out process, and lo and behold, six gushers out of 52 bottles total.

 

[ncbrewer]

It could be a one-off problem. Could be an infection - to me, 92.3% seems like high attenuation for US-05. Could also be incomplete mixing in of the priming sugar. Be careful with those bottles.

 

[Calder]

Incomplete mixing, or bad bottle may be it.

You can check to see if it is the beer. Nexf bottle you open, fill hydrometer jar and let beer go flat. Check gravity.