The first bottle exploded in the beer cellar, as I discovered when I went down to grab a beer. My nose told me first. My basement and beer cellar tend to be musty, but I don't usually smell beer down there. This time, I did - good beer, even! Smelling it was like a distant warning signal. Something was amiss, and I initially wasn't sure what it was. It made me take an extra look around, and I saw a splattering of brew on the top of a fermentation bucket. Then I saw speckles of beer in more places, then drips, and then puddles. When I found the offending bottle, I discovered it was a 22-oz. bomber (aptly named) of my homebrewed Belgian-style golden strong ale, and it was on the top shelf of the cellar. It had blown its bottom off - a fact that my children later found quite amusing. The bottom was cracked in half, and both halves were right under the bottle. There was evidence of a bit of beer spray, and a few glass shards, but mostly it appeared that the bottom had blown off and the beer had just gushed out.
About half the bottles on that shelf, and half of the bottles on each of the three shelves below, were sitting in pools of beer. I spent a long, frustrating time pulling all of those out, rinsing them off, and mopping up the mess. I did open a 12-oz. bottle of the same beer, wondering if perhaps it had gotten infected in some way and that the infection had caused the explosion, but the beer was really good. Also really carbonated. Hmmm... Let's see. I had used the right amount of priming sugar, and the final gravity had been on target. So had the original gravity. I wasn't sure what had happened. Finally, I decided that the beer was just a very bubbly brew, and that particular bottle had had a weak spot. After all, it was the only one that had gone.
At least up to that point.
I put out the rinsed bottles to dry overnight on dishtowels in the kitchen, and at 4:18 a.m., I awoke to the sound of another one going. It's hard to wake up at that hour, yanked from a deep sleep, and I wasn't sure what I had heard. But I knew something was wrong, and then it dawned on me that what I had heard sounded like it may well have been...
Yes, a bottle - the same type of 22-oz. bomber, with the same beer in it - had blown up in the kitchen. Again, there were some signs of spray, but mostly evidence of a break and a gush of beer. I cleaned it up again, wondering what might be going on here, and this time I put all bottles of the Belgian-style homebrew in a big plastic bin with a lid. If any blew up, they'd be contained and dangerous only to their fellow beers in the bin.
Interestingly, it's now been a couple of weeks, and no others have exploded. Count me lucky. The beer is very tasty, a richly malty, fruity, somewhat peppery brew with a generous head and long finish. Of course, every bottle I've had has been really carbonated, and I now think I know what must have happened. Although I did check to make sure that the final gravity was within the desired range, I should have checked a few days later to make sure it wasn't fermenting further. I suspect that if I had, I would have seen that the beer had attenuated even more. Instead, I was impatient to bottle the beer, which was a high gravity brew and had been in the fermenter a pretty long time already. In short, I was done with fermentation, but the beer wasn't.
Patience isn't my strong suit, to be sure, but attention to detail generally is. The two traits - impatience and attention to detail - don't really get along. But I can hope that this little brewing lesson sticks: Keep on attending to the details, and be patient enough to allow that attention to be paid throughout the length of the brewing and bottling process. Or be prepared to lose some precious homebrew.
