New to Home Brewing

Yep, that's what I would do if I was concerned about it.

 

Bottle bombs are a real concern, but you shouldn't be worried about actually blowing up your house or anyone getting hurt. Bottle bombs are not fireworks.

The bottom of the bottle at the crease is the weak point and usually the place the glass fails. Sometimes the neck goes. But the bottle doesn't actually explode like a grenade. The bottom just fractures and all the beer leaks out. You might not even know it until you see the wet beer on the floor, or it starts to smell like stale beer.

If you store the bottles in a cardboard case you'll be fine. The real headache is cleaning up 12 ounces of sticky warm beer.
Cheers.

 

Instead of worrying about bottle bombs you just need to learn the process of bottling so that you'll gain the confidence that you did it right. Patience, a hydrometer and knowing how much priming sugar you need for the actual amount of beer that you have are your best friends to eliminate the over-carbing exposure, so if you don't have at least one of them, you should keep that plastic or cardboard container close-by to contain the mess.

 

That may be true most of the time, but when I had bottle bombs, they went BOOM! Glass was flung all over. So that scene in Breaking Bad felt realistic to me.

I don't want to scare people too much, but I think it's better to be safe than sorry.

 

It does happen. I had a batch of root beer that had some over-carbed bottles, and several of them exploded and sent glass out about 4-5 feet within a day or two of each other.

 

I've never had that happen. Did you not ferment fully, or at all haha. Or did you prime to a ridiculous amount? I've had one batch of Hefe's (carbed higher than some beers) pop a few bottoms.

 

I just had a bottle of my weisenbock blow the rubber gasket out of one of my swing-top Grolsch bottles... but the glass held! That's what you get when you forget to stir the priming sugar in your bottling bucket... One of the bottles was also VERY flat.

Won't do THAT again!

 

Secondary containment is always a good idea (for a lot of things, but especially for beer bottles and fermenters)

 

Walmart tub with towel over will work fine

 

The best remedy is to prevent bottle bombs all together. Make sure fermentation is complete and not stalled. Use a priming sugar calculator and accurately measure. Make sure the priming solution is evenly distributed through your beer.

Follow these three steps and bottle bombs are highly unlikely.

But yeah, I'll third the notion that a bottle bomb can send glass flying at least five feet. Experience from the dark old early homebrewing days verifies this.

 

I primed a reasonable amount but didn't stir the priming solution into my beer at all thoroughly. Probably some bottles were under-carbed and some were just right, but I had no way of knowing so I dumped them all. Lesson learned.

 

Yep that would do it. I typically made a simple syrup for my priming solution put that in my bottling bucket and then racked the beer on top of it, never had a real problem with it not mixing properly.

 

This is what I have always done. I don't know what went wrong with that particular batch, but I'm pretty sure the simple sugar must have been concentrated at the bottom of the bucket or something. These days I stir it pretty thoroughly (while trying to be gentle to avoid unnecessary oxidation).

 

I think allowing the flow of the beer from the siphon tube is slightly risky for getting proper dispersion throughout the beer. Proper dispersion from the flow of the beer over the sugar is probably directly dependent upon how thick/thin the sugar solution is, so I always make my solution in a quart of water so it stays thin. Then I still gently stir the beer several times during the bottle-filling process for 5 gallons to keep that sugar suspended in the beer. (I purposely keep my beer quantity down a quart during fermentation so that I end up with my required 5 gallons after I add the sugar solution.)

 

I have always just racked the beer into the sugar syrup solution and have had no problems with bottle bombs or uneven carbonation with this method (same as yours but no stirring). I am always cautious to make a very thin syrup and like you it's usually around 1 quart. My guess would be that people who have uneven carbonation using this method have bottle bombs because of unfermented sugars in the beer, too much priming sugar, or making the sugar syrup too thick.