Imagine the excitement to quench your thirst with an ice cold refreshing beer vanishing as you swing open your fridge and see nothing but shattered glass and precious liquid dripping all over your fridge…
Good thing that pizza box soaked up some of the beer, but talk about having a sticky and messy fridge added to the honey-do list…
Oh yeah, when a mess like this joins the things to do list, I bet it slides across the table to you…
And you’ll have to clean it up like it or not…
The good news is that others before us have created beer bottle grenades and lived to tell us about their experiences and what caused such atrocity… it’s like creating your own at home Molotov bomb… ha, I remember when we used to fill up plastic bottles with muratic acid and dropped pieces of aluminum foil, capped the bottle and let it expand itself to explosion*… that’s more or less what will happen to over-carbonated bottles, only it takes a bit longer for them to ka-boom on ya…
This is a common mistake most brewers will make at least once in their brewing career.
It all started when Mr. Brewer (to save him some face) decided his yeasties were done turning sugar into alcohol and fermentation was complete…
The time came to rack the beer into a bottling bucket… and to keep my language clean, I’ll say… “that’s when the egg hit the fan”… and just for arguments sake, this can happen whether you are racking your beer to a secondary fermenting bucket or carboy or anywhere else…
Mr. Brewer thought he’d save a few minutes and a couple of bucks by not going to the store and getting more sanitizing stuff… he figured a quick rinse would do since he’d done a good job cleaning up the bucket before putting it away last time he used it…
I’m willing to bet the hose used to syphon his beer has never been scrubbed…
In other words we call this “poor sanitation practices”… in my opinion this is a poor excuse… Mr. Brewer could have at the very least used some bleach…
Most off flavors and aromas are caused by poor sanitation practices… this particular problem can actually be simply by over-priming your bottles, but this time Mr. Brewer found himself in a ‘gusher bug’ situation…
When a beer is cracked open you may hear a small hissing sound, but when it starts to sound like you opened a soda pop (and I’m not from the Midwest), you run the risk of having over-carbonated beers… more often than not, it is caused by poor sanitation…
If nothing else, I hope you learned one of the many reasons why sanitation is important when brewing beer…
*I hope this is redundant, but please do not try this at home… we were professional kids operating in a controlled environment under expert supervision…
