Bottle Gushers

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monty1
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Joined: Tue Sep 24, 2013 3:47 pm
Location: BS3

Bottle Gushers

Post by monty1 »

Hi,

I've opened a few of my latest batch of dark scottish ale over the last few weeks as they mature and they have all been gushsers, and I mean real gushers - erupting 20-30% of the contents immediately on opening.

So, what happened? I primed with 40g of table sugar in my 15 litre batch, this was dissolved in water and well mixed in. I used a priming calculator for this (Brewer's friend or Northern Brewer - don't recall specifically but they pretty much agreed). I don't think they were overprimed.

I bottled after two weeks in primary and a few days of cold crashing - the gravity readings were stable for several days , so i'm fairly confident that fermentation had completed. There was no secondary fermentation.

Which leaves infection - I'm fairly thorough with sanitising, and at least 6 bottles have so far been affected which could only mean an entire batch infection - there is no identifiable taste of infection - no cardboard, no sourness, no staleness, no tcp - it tastes OK, it smells OK.

The final thing is - i brewed with honey, about 5% of the bill, I know it's around 95% fermentable, I presume the 5% non fermentable cannot be used in the carbonation, so did not contribute and that the fermentable sugars were used up in primary? en

Anyone offer any advice? I presume there's nothing that can be done? I guess i could try and vent them, but they do seem to start gushing at the slightest opening.
PMowdes
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Re: Bottle Gushers

Post by PMowdes »

If you are sure that you can't taste anything off then you've probably ballsed up your calculations somewhere.

Could be a wild yeast or Brett infection. Brett can take a little while to get going and give you any noticable aroma.

Brett can digest most types of sugars, including those unfermentable to saccharomyces, so will continue to ferment even if you think that there are no residual fermentables and you are sure that your fermenation is complete.

Hard to say exactly what it is tho without tasting it.
60 percent of the time it works every time.
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Taz Ales
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Re: Bottle Gushers

Post by Taz Ales »

You say that the gravity readings were stable, but what was the gravity? Had it actually reached your target FG (taking into account mash temp and yeast variety)? It's possible that fermentation may have stalled rather than finished.
Taz... or Chris. It's up to you.
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EckersKlein
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Re: Bottle Gushers

Post by EckersKlein »

Honey may be slow to ferment, based on my experience with mead. Granted, that's a very different beast, but I'd at least be suspicious that maybe the yeast was still slowly chomping honey when it was bottled.

If you're real careful with a bottle opener, you can just barely crack open the caps to the point where gas can escape, but the cap will still seal when you release the opener. Do that a once a day until you're back down to the CO2 level you originally aimed for. It probably wouldn't hurt to run a capper over the caps just to make sure they're resealing as they should.
monty1
Posts: 80
Joined: Tue Sep 24, 2013 3:47 pm
Location: BS3

Re: Bottle Gushers

Post by monty1 »

Target finishing gravity was 1.01 giving me about 4% abv from a 1.04 OG. My actual finishing gravity was a little under 1.01.
Drinking one now - still taste fine, nothing discernibly off. Chilled this overnight and got no eruption at all - just a gentle fizz on popping the cap.

Another problem which may be connected is there is a lot of sediment and it doesn't seem to settle to the bottom of the bottle, it's suspended in the beer.
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