Kaboom!

OK. So I'm lying there in my bed, watching a little toob on my computer. It was something about Einstein and the atomic bomb from the BBC. I'm about half way between enthralled by the program and asleep, happy and toasty warm under the covers.

Suddenly... Kaboom! Then a short silence, and a thud*.

So naturally, being that I live in Texas, I grabbed my shotgun and started blasting everything in sight... no, just kidding. I did not do that.

It could only be one thing. Well, it could be several, as there are various 12 ozers and bombers of beer in a plastic carrying case (segmented to hold 24 beers).

That batch seems to have gone from "not too bad, but could use a little more carbonation / time in the bottle," to "Kaboom!" in no time flat (i.e. less than a week). Today I popped one that I put in the fridge right before I went to bed, and there's definitely a lot of carbonation (huge head too).

No signs of infection, tastes fine (not one of my greatest accomplishments, but they'll all get drank). It was an ESB, BTW. I'm quite sure there was 128 grams of corn sugar used for about 5 gallons of wort into the bottling carboy, so it wasn't over-primed.

I suppose there is a chance that attenuation wasn't finished, because troof be told, I didn't check the FG on this one, or the other one that was bottled the same day. They had been in the fermentation freezer for nearly a month. They HAD to be done by now, as there was a big krausen ring, and obviously it fermented.

My theory is that the yeast wasn't quite done when those days of extreme low temperatures (for texas at least) happened. My freezer/controller setup is not itself heated (one-way controller). More importantly, it was in an unheated section of the house, and the cold snap was during the days that nobody was home (so the heat would have been set on 55F for the days nobody was there, and the heating isn't that efficient in that room).

The yeast itself was S-04. The yeast in the non-bottle bomb beers was T-58. Obviously the thing to do at this point is get those babies into the fridge ASAP, and the ones that won't fit, put into a closed lid plastic container. Or I could do nothing, and just sleep with body armor and a combat helmet.

It is conceivable that the yeast might have gotten down to as low as 50F and stayed there for a day or two. Really this seems like a long shot, as yeast have a heartier reputation than this. But other than this fairly longshot theory, I'm really not sure what's up with the bottle bomb(s). One way or another, it seems there's a bit too much for the yeasties to eat, and they're getting a full.

Note to self: don't skip the FG measurement. Or if you do, sleep in a foxhole if there's any bottled homebrew nearby, like for instance in a carrying case in your room.

*the thud was the upper half of the bottle landing from its parabolic path through the air.

 

I'm in the only neighborhood in Texas where the local plant hasn't blown up yet.

 

Well I suppose it could have been a single infected bottle, but since I have been far pickier about bottles and sanitation, that seems fairly unlikely.

As far as uneven distribution of priming sugar, that also seems highly unlikely. All the remaining bottles are quite carbonated (I'm drinking one now, in fact). I'm on around 40 batches and haven't had that problem yet, so I must assume that it's probably not the case.

Now as far as only one bottle exploding, the plastic case has dividers between bottles that would likely shield the vast majority of explosive energy from the adjacent bottles. That must be why there wasn't a big disaster, with explosions to the point where I'd have to keep shooting, and then reload several times.