How to prevent home brew beer gusher explosions!

Have you ever opened a home brewed beer and it just gushed out like a pent up volcano that just had to blow its load?

It's hugely disappointing.

A foamy wetness that signals failure.

You've put in all that effort to may you brew and then it literally just splashes all over the kitchen sink or worse in front of your mates you're having some beers and BBQ with.

So what can you do about bottle gushers or 'bottle bombs' ?

There's a couple of ways to prevent gushers and they are pretty simple.

Clean your brewing equipment to prevent gushers

The first one, which isn't a solution but a warning, is to ensure that you have maintained excellent sanitization practices with your brewing.

There is nothing more disappointing than realising your brew has been contaminated with infection when you open bottle after bottle and be confronted with a mass of foam that gives Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park a run for its money.

You've set off a beer bomb!

So the lesson here is clean your brewing equipment!

The second way to prevent beer gushers is dead easy:

Don't put so much sugar in your bottles! 

I've learned this one the hard way. 

If you place too much sugar into your bottles, the yeast will go to town on it as part of the secondary fermentation and produce an excess of CO2.

When that happens, you're on a trip to gusher town.

So, it doesn't matter if you are placing sugar in the individual bottles or priming the whole brew, cut down on that sugar.

My personal rule of thumb is that for a 750 mls bottle, a FLAT tea spoon of sugar is more than enough to get a great level of carbonation.

If you want to employ a quicker method, you could try using carbonation drops. If using those, put two in a 750 mls bottle and one for a 500 mls bottle.

Batch priming with a correct amount of sugar is a good idea to ensure a correct amount is consistently applied across each bottle.

You can also try jelly beans if you're feeling adventurous...

You were not a patient grass hopper

If you bottled your beer before primary fermentation had finished you run the risk of gushers.

If this is the case, you can simply vent your beer by opening the beer cap very slightly letting the CO2 escape. 

You can then re cap the bottle.

You'll need to be patient this time.

It's getting hot in here...

I also have a theory about gushers but I don't have any proof or evidence that I'm right but I think that if you open 'warm' beer, it is more likely to gush. When I say warm beer, I simply mean beer that hasn't spent a day in a fridge chilling out. 

I did an accidental experiment the other week when I noticed I had a couple of gushers in a recent brew.

It was the first opening of a new batch so I was a bit disappointed. The next night I put two bottles in the fridge and had a cracked one open the after work the next day. 

And no gusher!

I suspect warm beer temperature allows the carbon dioxide gas to escape quicker than a cold beer. 

So it's hardly scientific proof but I'd be open to discussion on it!

Be careful of exploding glass shards and shrapnel

Several brews ago I walked into my 'man shed' where I keep my beer and I thought a nuclear 'beer bomb' had been set off. There was green and brown glass everywhere and the smell of beer in the air. 

What had happened was my beer had actually become infected and the CO2 build up from a runaway yeast had caused a beer to explode. 

I suspect that the explosion caused a minor chain reaction of sorts and the bottles closest to the original exploding bottle blew up due to the fragments of glass that flew their way at presumably very hostile speeds!

This thus serves a reminder to keep your fermenting beer out in a place where glass explosions cannot harm people. At the very least keep them out of eyesight level of little and big people. 

Covering with a old sheet can prevent glass missiles being shot at faces. Or place them in a card board box if you can. 

But the best way to fix this problem is to not over carbonate with sugar!

2 comments beer gushers, cleaning your equipment, sterilization

Venting over carbonated beer bottles

Have you ever had a beer gusher? 

They damn well suck.

You casually open your beer and whoosh! There's beer foam all over the bloody place. 

Why did this happen? 

The fizz is the result of over carbonation. 

There could be a few reasons for this. 

1. You bottled too soon and fermentation continued.

2. Your beer is infected by bacteria and they have overproduced on the CO2

3. You added too much sugar at bottling time.
4. You served your beer too warm

All these factors you have a strong degree of control over. 

If you've bottled too soon, you should have taken a final gravity reading and determined that matched the kind of beer your making and that you had the same reading two days in a row. 

If your beer is infected, it's quite likely you didn't clean and sterilize your equipment and bottles properly. I've said this a million times on these pages, you got do the basics and do them well. 

And if you added too much sugar, you might want to rethink your practices. If you batch primed, how much sugar did you add?

From my experience 40 - 60 grams is enough sugar to prime 23 litres of beer.

 Any more and you will quite likely get gushers. 

If you added sugar individually to each bottle, then you clearly added too much sugar. I used to use a good amount of sugar, now I try and use half a tea spoon of sugar. It's more than enough. 

If you want a consistent and safe measure, you can always consider using carbonation drops when bottling your brew. 

How to fix gusher beers by venting the bottle

To fix over carbonation, vent your beers individually. 

The technique is that you gently pry the bottle cap open so that only a part of the cap is exposed, let the CO2 escape and then quickly recap.

You need to all of this before the gusher occurs! If you are clever you should be able to use your bottle opener to both open and close the cap with the same action. 

It will be a long, painful process and you'll likely need to repeat the venting on each bottle if there is a lot of built up pressure. 

I have found in the past that the colder the beer is, the less likely it is to gush or be too fizzy or foamy.

Thus I would recommend that you leave your beers in a fridge for 24 hours before attempting this little rescue job of your beer.

Let's be clear though - if you've got gushers because you've got a bacteria problem, your beer is rooted and you'll need to tip it out and sterilize the bottles very well. Or you can store for a long time and hope the beer sorts itself out. That's kind of a Hail Mary move though...

A wee risk to bear in mind 

Over-pressurized beer can explode.

And that means glass can explode. I've seen the result in my man shed - green glass everywhere and the dank smell of wasted beer. 

If your under pressure beers are at that much of an extreme point you should ask yourself is it safe to vent?

While beer bottles are generally tough, the risk is there so I'd recommend you use gloves and a good pair of safety googles or glasses. 

What's the lesson here then? 

Use less sugar when bottling beer

Extra for Experts: Carbonating homebrew using a Soda Stream machine

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My secret way to properly pour a home brew beer

Have you ever poured a bottled home brew beer and it's been simply too fizzy and the head is like a giant ice-cream?

I'm not taking about a genuine beer gusher here, rather just a beer that's too frothy.

It's quite frustrating!

I've discovered a secret to helping poor such beers without much fuss.

But first, why fizzy beer?

In my case, I think this is caused by adding too much sugar to the bottle for secondary fermentation (which is a great argument for batch priming) but not so much that you've caused a gusher beer.

You can manage this in a couple of ways. Instead of having one glass for pouring the beer into, have two at the ready.

By doing a careful transfer you can get the whole beer into both glasses, let the head die down and then transfer into one glass. But that can actually froth things up even more.

Go figure.

So what's my secret?

Pour a little bit of water into the glass before you pour the beer. About 1 cm level is enough. Open your beer and pour slowly into the glass at about a 45 degree angle give or take.

As your beer fizzes into the glass, the water somehow manages to capture the froth and diffuses it somehow. Don't ask me the science of it, I just work here.

I discovered this trick by accident when going through an over sugared batch of stout and it seems a fairly good method.

I'm not saying you should add water to every beer for every time you pour but suggest that if you notice a batch has a tenancy to fizz up, then give it a try and see if that helps.

Nothing will save a beer that has too much sugar though!

Another tried and true trick to prevent fizzy pours is to ensure that your beer has been refrigerated for 24 hours. Based on my own personal testing, the cold definitely helps with a easy pour.

A wee caution

And in case you are very new to home brewing, don't pour out that last inch of beer from the bottle, those yeasty dregs of sediment are the bi-product of the fermentation process. They do not add to the drinking experience and apparently can have quite the laxative effect !

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