Overprimed the bottles...oops.

[Cody]

So my last batch I had planned on having 5 gallons for bottling, not taking into account the gunk left on the bottom of the fermenter. I went ahead and merrily mixed up my 5 oz of dextrose into a priming solution just like I would for 5 gallons of beer and added it to the bottling bucket, then racked my beer over, only to discover that I had about a gallon's worth of lightly compacted, floating debris and yeast. Oh well. I bottled anyway.

Needless to say, this beer is overcarbonated. I followed the BYO recipe for a Fat Tire clone...which is way too chocolatey and dark. After a month of conditioning, my beer, while tasting fine, has a very noticeable (to me) carbonic acid bite. Knowing that the colder the beer temp, the more dissolved CO2 you get, I tried one at room temp: better. I also tried cracking the seal, recrimping, and then sticking it in the fridge; also good. Using an online bottle priming calculator, it says I'm sitting at around 3.2 volumes of CO2.

Two comments:
1) I think I will give these some time to mellow and mature.
2) I love how the recipe suggests lowering the amount of priming sugar to mimic Fat Tire's low carbonation level.

On a positive note: I know my bottles can handle the pressure of up to 3.2 vols/CO2.

[brewinhard]

Another tip for drinking over carbonated beer is to heartily swirl your glass many times to release excess CO2 in suspsension and as the beer warms up it will slowly get down to the desired volumes. Think of it as smelling the aroma of your beer for 20 times before actually drinking!

[skerrydude]

I have had a similar mishap. I was thinking that a way to prevent bottle bombs would be to either heat or cool/freeze the beer. Would that not make the yeast stop eating the sugars if I did either of those or is heating my only option? How long would I put the filled bottles into boiling water to assure the yeast was killed/stopped?

[spiderwrangler]

I have had a similar mishap. I was thinking that a way to prevent bottle bombs would be to either heat or cool/freeze the beer. Would that not make the yeast stop eating the sugars if I did either of those or is heating my only option? How long would I put the filled bottles into boiling water to assure the yeast was killed/stopped?

I wouldn't heat if you are already in the bottle bomb neighborhood... remember that warmer liquid holds less dissolved gas, so you'd be increasing the pressure inside the bottle. Although if it's submerged, at least the ensuing explosion is contained... Cooling can work, that's how bottle conditioned homemade pop is done... once it's carbonated, you refrigerate it all to keep the yeast from going too far. However, if you have lots of sugar left to ferment, it's going to taste sweeter than if it were fully conditioned, similar to taking a taste during bottling before and after adding priming sugar. I've been playing around with using carbonation tabs instead of priming sugar, so that it's dosed per bottle rather than for the whole batch, to avoid the same issue that the OP had. I've got a batch of JBA that got boiled a bit long, so only ended up with about 4.5ish in the fermenter that I'm going to be using tabs on rather than trying to calculate how much sugar I need on the fly.

[Cody]

Freezing isn't a great option, either. As the water molecules rearrange into a crystalline structure in order to prepare themselves for freezing, two things happen: they cannot hold as much dissolved gas, and (compounding the problem) they expand, taking up more volume. So even a properly carbonated beer can explode when frozen, simply due to the expansion of the water.

[PSUHomebrewer]

If you faith in your capper, caps and capping ability you could heat to 140, not boiling and pasteurize the beer similar to what professionals do. Though I would probably heat the bottles and the water together so you slowly raise the temp and again the reverse to cool. The key is temp control, very slowly raise the temp to not stress the glass more than it already is and again for cooling. This will also limit the bombs since if a cap or bottle starts to fail you can stop the process there.

The other advantage is you shouldn't need to worry about bottle infections since most oF the bugs will be dead. Though on the same note, you may want to back add yeast and start with as clear a beer as possible, to prevent any autolysis flavors.