Greetings all!
I've had a batch of Belgian Strong take a fairly serious turn. The beer has been WAY overcarbonated from almost day 1 in the bottle. I think I didn't let it sit long enough in the secondary (2 weeks). It seemed to be finished as there was no bubbling that I detected in the airlock, but evidently I was wrong.
At any rate, the cause of overcarbonation seems relatively obvious to me, but recent events are a bit of a puzzle. From time to time, I've found a bottle exploded in the garage where I store the beer. Not many, maybe 4-6 total in about as many months. So, I haven't really worried about it much. The beer's been really good if you open it into a bowl and let the foam settle before trying to put it into a glass.
The other day, though, I took a six pack into the house and set them in the fridge and BAM! Just as I set it down, one blew up in my face! No injuries luckily, just glass everywhere and beer all over the fridge. I VERY CAREFULLY took the beer out of the fridge, set it in the sink, and set about cleaning up the fridge when BAM! Another went off behind me in the sink. I covered the whole thing with newspaper and a beach towel and left it sit for a while and all but one of the remaining bottles blew up.
Out they ALL went into the garbage can (again, carefully!). Not messing with that anymore! There weren't more than 6 or 8 left anyway, so it wasn't a huge loss, but sad nonetheless. As they sat in the trash can, though, almost all of the rest of them went off, too.
Now that it's over, the whole episode is pretty comical. After the first couple, I was crawling around on the floor behind the counter to get to stuff to cover them up with! I'm glad nobody else was there to see that! I called a friend and fellow homebrewer and told him the story while I was waiting in another room for the ones in the sink to finish exploding, and he could barely talk he was laughing so hard. At the time, though, it was a pretty frightening experience.
My question is why, all of a sudden, did they start going off like so many bottle rockets? Did they just hit a critical mass all at once? Could bringing them in the house from the garage (where it was really hot, probably close to 100 and maybe 85 in the house) be enough of a sudden change in temperature to cause this? Was it moving and shaking them up just enough? What about the ones in the trash? If anything, they got hotter in the garbage can than they were in the garage?
I suppose the lesson here is to either open and recap the whole batch after the first exploding bottle, or just pitch them, but I didn't think that would work. Would it have? How do you know when it's time to do that? I've had overcarbonated beer before, but never have I had bottles explode. Any other thoughts from more experienced hands out there?
Thanks!
Krista