I go to the basement. I grab my 2nd Solstice d'hiver from the beer fridge. I grab my bottle opener. I go to pop off the cap and CRACK! The top of my bottle disintegrates into a half dozen pieces. First time that's ever happen to me. Drain pour the beer and grab another one. On second inspection it looks like the bottle has been re-used a lot. Anybody else have a bottle fail on them?
It was a twist off which is the norm for DDC beers here. Out of habit I use a bottle opener on all my bottles. I once had a nick of glass from the thread come off but never had a bottle just break on me.
Had a growler bottom detach ... literally. Brought it back and was told that it's the nature of glass (after they replaced the growler, beer and my growler confidence ) . I'm thinking it was a combination of pressure, temperature and/or a flaw in the glass.
Happened to me once - the entire top 2" of the bottle came off in one clean break when I tried pulling the cap off. I can't remember what it was though...
It happened to me once opening a coors lite for a customer... shattered into pieces while the cap with partial glass intact stayed attached to my bottle opener. Shit was corroded to the cap. Sounds to me like you may have encountered some sort of contaminated case or batch. BTW we have 22 drafts and 100 craft bottles where i work... some still order the "sex in a canoe"
Had an Ithaca root beer break in my hands yesterday while opening. I have noticed the caps on Flower Power being harder to pop than other beers so it may be the capping process they use.
Canada's system in not unusual, they re-use beer bottles in most of the rest of the world - it's the US brewing industry that is the outlier. Of course, we in the US once had returnable/refillable bottles, too, but they slowly died out for a variety of reasons.
