ozpowell
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- Joined
- 8/6/05
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Put this one down to experience. Thought I'd share with others so as to spare them the pain.
I normally keg my beer (that's my excuse for being so stupid, anyway). However I've just recently finished a batch of Barleywine that I intend to lay down for 12 months or more, so I decided to bottle this batch instead. I remembered reading somewhere that keeping the head-space in the bottles as small as possible would minimize oxidization of the beer as it ages. So, given that these beers are keepers, I figured I'd better try to keep the head-space as close to zero as possible (in fact, most bottles had exactly zero head-space).
That was my first mistake.
My second mistake was to bottle my beer straight out of the CC fridge (at 3oC).
Roughly half an hour after finishing my bottling I heard a loud "crack" coming from the bar area. Bottle number one down. At this point I hadn't figured out that the bottle broke because the liquid had expanded in the bottle, and stupidly put it down to a dodgy bottle. Clean up mess...
Next day, two more. At this stage I know it isn't the bottles (the bottles were all from different sources and were different ages). But I also know it can't possibly be infection or over-priming - there's no way that within 30 minutes, sufficient CO2 could build up to break a bottle.
That night it dawned on me what the problem was. And after re-capping all of the bottles, surprise, surprise, no more exploding bottles.
Moral of the story - always leave at least a little head-space when bottling, especially when bottling cold.
I normally keg my beer (that's my excuse for being so stupid, anyway). However I've just recently finished a batch of Barleywine that I intend to lay down for 12 months or more, so I decided to bottle this batch instead. I remembered reading somewhere that keeping the head-space in the bottles as small as possible would minimize oxidization of the beer as it ages. So, given that these beers are keepers, I figured I'd better try to keep the head-space as close to zero as possible (in fact, most bottles had exactly zero head-space).
That was my first mistake.
My second mistake was to bottle my beer straight out of the CC fridge (at 3oC).
Roughly half an hour after finishing my bottling I heard a loud "crack" coming from the bar area. Bottle number one down. At this point I hadn't figured out that the bottle broke because the liquid had expanded in the bottle, and stupidly put it down to a dodgy bottle. Clean up mess...
Next day, two more. At this stage I know it isn't the bottles (the bottles were all from different sources and were different ages). But I also know it can't possibly be infection or over-priming - there's no way that within 30 minutes, sufficient CO2 could build up to break a bottle.
That night it dawned on me what the problem was. And after re-capping all of the bottles, surprise, surprise, no more exploding bottles.
Moral of the story - always leave at least a little head-space when bottling, especially when bottling cold.
