Found an exploded bottle!!

[ryan]

I found an exploded bottle today so I need to figure out how to deal with the rest of the bottles as safely as I can.

I bottled my beer 8 days ago with 90g sugar to 20L of beer. I had an idea to control the temp of the bottles by putting the bottles into two fermenters filled with water at 24C, then to insulate them with some camping mats and check and adjust the temp daily... seemed to be going pretty well until the water went slimey!

I put it down to it being the grolsch bottles that i was using spitting a bit of pressure out. Some of the bottles were upside down under the water so I thought it must have been a bit of sweet beer coming out and then that getting infected. So I went to clean it all out today and put fresh water in and take the bottles that weren't upright out, but one of them had broken in half at the bottom, so now I need to go about this very carefully as there could be more unexploded ones.

What should I do now?!

 

[BrewStew]

crikey!

were you aiming for about 2.1-2.2 volumes?

seems to me like those bottles cant take the strain

you can carefully ease the lip of the caps till you hear a hiss, them get your capper on them to squash them back down again to release the pressure.. aside from that i cant think of anything else.

hope the rest are ok mate *fingers crossed*

 

[ryan]

Well the ones I took out a few days ago don't have much pressure in them so I'm hoping it's just a duff bottle. They're grolsch bottles btw, swing-top ones.

 

[BrewStew]

hmmmmm :hmm:

if you bulk primed by adding the sugar to the full volume i cant see how that happend... if you maunally poured sugar (or a sugar solution) into each bottle individually before adding the beer, then it could just be the odd over primed bottle.

 

[ryan]

I wanted about 2.0 volumes .. but really it's just based on 80g per 20L being a bit too flat the last time.

Yeah i bulk-primed and we were even swirling the beer in the fermenter around as it was being bottled just to make sure the sugar was evenly distributed.

 

[BrewStew]

hmmm :hmm:

if you bulk primed i cant see any other reason that a bottle popped other than it may have been defective. especially when you said some were flat, unless some of the flip tops are leaking

 

[ryan]

Yeah, looks like it's just one damaged bottle.. the others sound fine. :

 

[BrewStew]

panic over *phew* ! :thumb:

 

[ryan]

Yeah it's not nice seeing a bottle explode infront of you!!

Had that a couple months back with a flask I was using to hold yeast in.. the cap wasn't screwed on tight but must have bunged up with yeast when it got tilted on it's side... few days later my wrist was gashed open by an inch from the explosion when I moved it back upright in the fridge. Lucky it only got my wrist, my face was right near it. Wasn't near a vein though so it wasn't too bad but it took a long time to heal because of where it was on the side of my wrist .. getting moved / twisted around a lot.

That was only 1mm thin glass.. If that.. Can't imagine what kind of pressure a good beer bottle could hold before blowing. :shock: :!:

 

[BrewStew]

jesus... sorry to hear mate!

 

[ryan]

Ah it wasn't so bad.. more of a shock than anything. Standing there after an explosion looking at the blood pouring out yer arm and the glass and yeast all over the place that you gotta clean up!

Yeah it could have been a lot worse though if that same piece of glass had hit my eye though... Can't underestimate the power of a bottle bomb!!