Over the weekend Alice and I bottled our new brew (which we've called "Sauce of the Nile"). In order to get the empty bottles ready for sterilising, I visited the cupboard where we keep all the beers - both empties and those being conditioned. There had clearly been a spillage, so I opened the boxes of Cleopatra's Asp (bottled on 15th April) to find an empty bottle stuck in the middle of the box. I lifted the bottle out and found this:
From what I've read about bottle bombs, this doesn't appear to be one. Even the cap is still firmly in place - it's just half of the bottle's base that has come clean off! No other bottles in the batch have any sign of problems and when opened are just nicely carbonated giving only a little hiss on and certainly not spraying everywhere!
I've asked on the homebrew forum for peoples' suggestions about what might have happened, and how we could avoid it happening again. I was worried that the ambient temperature of about 30 degrees C caused problems, but explained that getting the beer any cooler for long-term storage isn't really possible without leaving the air conditioner running for months on end. However, people don't seem to think that's the problem (although the heat does slightly increase the pressure in the bottle).
Instead, most people agree that it's a structural weakness in the bottle. Now this itself is a bit worrying as all our beers are bottled in these bottles (Stella lager) and we don't really want to see 46 litres of beer on the floor! This, however, is the only bottle that's had a problem and the half-moon of the base that has come away seems so perfect that I reckon only a structural weakness in this particular bottle could have produced it.
One suggestion is thermal shock, which is a possibility as we oven-bake the bottles to sterilise them, but since we let them heat up (and cool down) gradually is certainly not the perfect explanation. I'm tempted to go with the suggestion that the bottle itself had been chipped or something, and we hadn't noticed it. It only seems to have burst in the last few days since the cardboard box was still damp from the spillage, so it had survived 6 weeks without a problem! I'm definitely concerned about leaving the bottles over the summer in the heat, but am being as optimistic as possible and hoping it was simply a one-off bad bottle.
I guess we could look into keeping them in the fridge, as it stays on all summer anyway...
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