Exploding bottles

The bottles shouldn't have exploded at 68. This temperature may not be ideal from a quality perspective for long term storage, but it certainly isn't dangerous. Bottles sit in a beer store at higher temperatures for much longer.

Two things could have realistically happened here. The beers are infected and over carbonated as a result. The beers were excessively shaken in transit.

 

68 F is a bit warm for beer if you are intentionally aging it but it can sit for months, if not years on a retail shelf at 68. I would more likely suspect a processing error at the brewery, an infection with wild yeast or bacteria in the beer or a fusarium infection in the malt.

 

sounds like a good name for a lite nite cable softcore **** movie that takes place in brewery

 

68 is absolutely fine as a cellaring temp. Not everyone can afford a climate controlled cellar, and the worst that could possibly happen is the beer ages a bit faster. A stable temp below 70 with no light is ideal for cellaring. Unless you are aging some kind of sour or uber barleywine for 10 years the basement is fine - most beers you cellar are only going to be for a few years anyway so a few degrees isn't going to make much difference.

That said, the exploding bottle is likely over carbonation, infection / refermentation, or a flaw in the glass. Possibly all 3.

A friend of my father once made a huge batch of homebrew and was bottle conditioning in his shed, but had added too much sugar. Couldn't go in the shed for a month because bottles were randomly going off like hand grenades and firing glass shrapnel all over the place. Funny as hell sitting in his back yard of an evening and hearing a bang every couple of hours. The look on his face each time a bottle exploded was priceless!

 

Fusarium is always said to be a cause of gushing. I don't know if it causes bottle bombs, but if you have a reference let me know, always learining.
http://www.crc.dk/flab/fusarium.htm

 

I've hade Rouge bottle explode in my basement.

 

I don't have a source but on a few occasions I have seen bottles gush with enough vigor that I can imagine them exploding but you are probably right. In my own experience I have caused bottle bombs by bottling too early, using too much priming sugar, and poor sanitation.

 

Flaws in glass bottles are more commonplace than most people realize. Most are found at the glass factory but a few get through anyway and those that do usually break on the bottling line, but even then rare ones can make it all the way out the door to your house. An expert can determine what kind of flaw was present by examining the broken shards. If you experience a bottle failure carefully sweep the pieces into a box and return it to the brewery (if they care).

 

Ive had a couple 6 gal batches in the past that gush (after 4 - 5 sec) of un-capping, even cooled down to about 40 deg...
I believe this to be the culprit.

 

I've had cans spontaneously explode near me. But I thought they were defective. Strangely, it was right after the phone books arrived. Not sure if there was any causation there, though.

 

Horribly ironically, I just had a bomber of Black Husky explode

 

Maybe the bottle was just too weak to hold back all that malty goodness :-)

 

There have been numerous reports of commercial beers exploding in stores and at home over the years. Haven't experienced it myself at home, but saw the aftermath at a local store once. Glad I wasn't there when it happened, shards and beer got some distance with the explosion!

 

When I worked at a bottle shop in college I can think of 1 or 2 times that we had bottles explode on the shelf. Corks or Crowns popping was more common but the 2 im thinking up were explosions. Never had it happen at home. Knock on wood.

 

Had one bottle of TommyKnocker brown explode in a room temperature closet. Wasn't home at the time, but came across the aftermath. From the looks of it there was some force behind the explosion.

 

I had a bottle of Duchessic explode in my cellar. Blew across the room. Only thing left in its original place was the base glass piece.

 

Two real possibilities here:
1. The beer, having realized it was an Orange Peel beer from Stone, decided to end it all.
OR
2. The beer was a terrorist suicide bomber. Any chance you heard a, "*****" before the boom?

 

I had a bottle explode at my liquor store. It was on the top shelf and the longneck of the bottle flew up about 25 ft into the air. took forever to clean as lil shards of glass got stuck to all the surrounding bottles. Thank goodness no customers were standing around when it happened or we would have a lawsuit on our hands.

 

epic side track on the 68F aspect