Your Exploding Beers; Cans, Bottles, etc.

My dad has some great stories about some over-carbed home brew. Said they had to open them in the sink, and slowly work the caps off, one minute increment at a time. He had a buddy who didn't get the memo. He'd been walking around with the bottle, and when he sat down to open it, it "Old Faithfulled" all the way to the ceiling.

 

Not a beer story, but my dad dropped a two liter of soda outside the store. It landed on the cap and shot across the parking lot, squirting a car or two along the way. He was quite impressed by the pressure that thing put out.

 

Probably most incidents of exploding bottles/cans will involve new breweries that are just beginning to bottle/can their beers, or for new homebrewers. Both involve being too eager to get done with the packaging and end up bottling/canning before the beer is done fermenting.

I bought a mixed 12-pack way back when Arcadia was just getting started, and the first beer that I opened of each the three types that were in that pack was a gusher. No exploding, but the mess is just as bad. The store took the unopened ones back and gave me full credit.

As a neophyte homebrewer I tried to brew a root beer. With all of the sugar that is in a soft drink the logic had not yet been learned by me that yeast will have a feast. Probably the instructions said to add the yeast, then to refrigerate to bottles after a few days to build up carbonation and then the yeast would go dormant from the cold, but I missed that part (if it was there). I sat four 6-packs on the basement floor while waiting to drink them over time. About a week or so after bottling, they started to explode and made a sticky, broken glass mess on the basement floor. I learned a lesson the hard way.

 

The 2017 Trader Joe's Quinquagenary Vintage Ale (basically TJ's annual Christmas beer) has a LOT of pressure in it. Being a 750ml Belgian-style beer, it has the standard cage-and-cork cap. Almost as soon as I untwist the cage, the cork shoots out of the bottle. I'm amazed I don't have marks on my kitchen ceiling. I finally wised up and opened my most recent bottle outside. I found the cork, but never did find the cage. Tho, I'm pretty sure it landed in the gutter, because I heard something rattle up there. I'll find out for sure when I have to start pulling the leaves out of the gutter. Thankfully the beer has never gushed on me.

 

The first time I made mead I bottled it in1.75l wine bottles and sealed it with wax Makers Mark style. Two of them exploded and sent glass and mead everywhere. Quite a sticky mess. The mead turned out good though. Bubbly like champagne. I learned to make sure the fermention is done before bottling.

 

My brother-in-law made his first homebrew with blueberries, and didn't understand that the fruit sugars would be fermented in addition to the sugar he added for bottle conditioning. They were stored in his parents' wine closet, and they all exploded, soaking all of their cardboard wine cases with purple beer, and making everything insanely sticky.

 

Oddly enough, I've had bad luck with two aptly named brews:

1. A can of "Geyser Gose" quite literally acted like a geyser. I cracked open the seal on the 16oz can and liquid began spewing out just like any geyser I have ever seen. Lost about half of the can before things slowed down and I was able to quickly dump the rest into a glass.

2. A bottle of "Ticky Ticky Boom" went boom when I popped it open. I've had beers fizz up and out when I turn my back on the beer to get the camera on and ready to go, but this one was instant. It was as if someone had turn on splash pad fountain from the water park for a few minutes. I lost about 1/3 of the 750mL. It was as if that bottle had been primed to live-up to its name. Funny thing is, that same brewery posted a complaint about people selling their beer on the secondary market. It's my one and only experience with them and it was disappointing.

I can say both breweries responded to my emails with batch number, date, format, place of purchase favorably, although I'm still waiting on the gift certificate from the second brewery.... That does help quite a bit. I actually carry the bottle opener the first one sent me on my key chain and rep them favorably despite the beer experience.

 

Not really an exploding can in the sense the OP intended but I have had several puncture incidents while hiking. I was not paying close attention when setting a can down and a sharp rock did the trick. Reminds me how thin those cans are and how easily they can be punctured.

 

I don't know if my story counts - I wasn't in the house when it happened, so I don't know if it was a rapid release. I imagine it was...but I still have pictures, so I figured I'd share it. If nothing else, a sad story of wasted beer.

Four newly-purchased swing-top glass growlers filled at Cigar City about 6 years ago. All four sitting in the cardboard box the growlers came in. And filled, of course, with Apple Brandy BA Hunahpu.

In the first 12 hours after filled, the bottom of one of the growlers came off. The break was very clean, almost as if it had been cut. Luckily, the cardboard contained most of the mess. The delicious, delicious mess...




CCB, to their credit, replaced the growler without a problem. Never an issue with any of the other growlers!

 

Sorry for your loss. Hope you at least had a straw handy

 

Adroit Theory in VA made a fruited gose with a couple variants using different fruit treatments. I believe it was draft only and then they started doing 4pk bottles, brewery only. Bottle bombs ensued after the fruit went through a secondary, but not only did they refuse to destroy them, they actually started distributing these bottles! A store near me had them in a cooler with a label (DO NOT LET THESE GET WARM!). How in the world could the profits off a couple dozen 4pks of beer, be worth endangering your customers/ losing your business in a lawsuit? Putting up a 'sign' probably does more to increase your liability since you know something was wrong, if someone got hurt.

Anyways, the name of the beer: "Illusion of Safety."

A LOT of people found that pretty amusing. It's a joke brewery anyways who are subject to a ton of static from people on FB who document trolling them at their taproom... but given their horrible faux-FFF branding (and overall shitty beers- that are all subject to a million variants even though the base is usually doo-doo to start off with)... I tend to side with the trolls on this one- the Illusion of Safety did NOT help their cause, nor demonstrate they know the first thing about brewing.

 

Thank you both for your kind sympathy!

I did briefly consider trying to rescue the beer, but I was afraid there would be glass shards in it. And as I said, CCB replaced the growler and gave me a free snifter of the AB Hunahpu for the trouble. Back in the good ol' days, I guess...

 

I enjoyed going to their brewery a few times because they always had tons of new beers to try. Most were mediocre, but once in a while they had a great one. My avatar is Angels Trumpet, which I loved. That said, their location is one of the worst in NOVA and the employees are pretentious.

 

I think I have heard of such things in the past, but this was the first time I had seen it. Quite loud. The can (Common Roots Half Cup) was in the sink already and as I noted the deformity in two cans the previous day, had managed to get one open (deformed they are not as easy to open as they are in their natural cylindrical state) but, inexplicably, left the other in the sink. This morning, while I was filling coffee pot at the bar sink, it exploded right in front of me.

Honestly, having had one from the four pack six weeks ago I was not anxious to drink the remainder anyway.

A picture would be nice here, but the extra step of uploading and linking was a bit daunting. In the end, I decided to link two pictures (since I was doing it anyway . . . one showing the exploded can, and one showing the gap (2nd row, all the way to the right) in the collection of beers set aside for 'Beer Gathering 3' by the departure of this can.

 

That's actually the first picture that I've seen of an exploded can. It's much easier to take a pic of it than it is to take a pic of scattered glass shards. Beware of future purchases from that brewery because they may not know what they are doing. Thanks for posting.

 

Yikes.

Looking it up, that's a 3% ABV coffee stout. I would expect to see this with something fruited and perhaps a bit higher ABV.

 

No matter what warnings might be on the cans or on the interwebs, breweries that are doing this are irresponsible and should not be patronized. I won't hold my breath, though, as a lot of these breweries are of the hypetrain variety so their customers will make every excuse in the book as to why they're still the awesomez!