Beware Exploding Bottles of Mead!

On Monday evening, I was doing some overdue cleaning, including cleaning the floor in the sunroom. I opened the beer/sports closet (it's a closet that we plan to use for sporting equipment, but currently holds beer equipment and home-brewed beer in various stages of fermentation) and realized the closet floor was covered in dirt and dog hair. (How does all that dirt and dog hair collect in a closet that stays closed almost all the time anyway?) I cleaned the floor, closed the door, and moved on.

That night, I was up late with Adelaida and heard a very loud noise (like a loud bang, or a door slamming, or something really heavy falling to the ground) coming from inside the house. With Dale gone, I was naturally more sensitive to such noises, but almost convinced myself that I had imagined it -- after all, the dogs would be barking if anything suspicious had happened, and we have an alarm on our house that would sound a siren and call the police if any of the doors or windows had been opened. I made a quick check through the house to make sure everything was in its place, talked to the pups a bit, confirmed that I had set the alarm and that the doors were all locked, and went to bed.

Fast-forward to today. Being stuck in the house all week, I've been catching up on cleaning and today was organizing the kitchen. There were a couple of empty beer bottles on the counter -- rinsed and waiting to be refilled with beer -- that really belong in the beer/sports closet. I took them to the closet, stepped inside the closet to put them in the "empty beer bottle" box, and realized that my slippers were sticking to the floor. Given that I had just cleaned the floor two days ago, that was especially puzzling to me. I checked the floor in some other areas -- also sticky -- and followed the stickiness up to the top shelf.

That's when I saw this:


Yes, a bottle of mead had exploded, leaving the bottom of the bottle sitting on the shelf, the body of the bottle embedded in the ceiling, and mead everywhere.

It must have been a pretty big explosion to embed the top of the bottle in the ceiling as well as it did!


Looking back, I shouldn't be surprised that this happened. Mead is honey-based wine and, like most wines, is generally not carbonated. Dale prepared the mead the first week in October, transferred it from one fermenter to another several times, and let it sit in the final fermenter for several weeks without seeing any evidence of further fermentation. We bottled it in early December, two months after starting the process. We opened a bottle in late December and drank it without noticing anything unusual. Six weeks later, we opened another bottle with friends in Colorado and noticed immediately that the mead was carbonated. That was weird, but we thought perhaps the fermentation process had continued in the bottles, so we realized we might have slightly carbonated mead (like champagne, a carbonated wine!). Apparently the fermentation process has continued even more, enough to cause a bottle to explode!

It even makes sense that the explosion happened in the middle of the night. The beer/sports closet is an interior room on the ground floor, which is heated by radiant heat in the slab. In the winter, our radiant heat comes on in the evening and runs overnight. The beer/sports closet has a heating pipe running under the floor and the closet door is kept closed, so the heat stays in the closet and the closet actually gets quite warm. Heat will increase the pressure of the gas inside the bottle, increasing the likelihood of an explosion. In retrospect, this shouldn't have been a surprise!

One final note: we've been distributing these bottles of mead to people since Christmas -- if you received one, it might be best to go ahead and open it now (over the sink, in case it fizzes over when opened), before you end up with a similar mess!