As a beer drinker nothing is more frustrating than buying a beer, opening it, and immediately foam starts gushing out from the top of the bottle. This exact situation happened to me a couple weeks ago. The beer I bought is called Praline, a Belgian-style stout brewed with vanilla pods, cocao nibs, and hazel nuts, from by La Sirene. I was really excited about this beer because it sounded amazing and I just had a really good wild Belgian tripple from the same brewery a week before. I’ll admit that I didn’t store the beer like the brewery recommended, cold and standing up right, but neither did the bottleshop which I bought it from. Long story short, sometime between when the beer was bottled and when I opened it the beer had caught a bacterial infection.
How do I know that it was infected? Well, the foam gushing out of the bottle was a hint, but that could have easily meant that I might have agitated the bottle (this beer was bottle conditioned*). So I looked it up and found this Ratebeer article that was particularly helpful: http://www.ratebeer.com/Beer-News/Article-462.htm I also tasted the beer and it tasted TERRIBLE! It was very thin and had very little carbonation, which is another sign of infection. Plus the foam had large uniform bubbles, which is not typical for regular carbonation. Final conclusion: infected. It was a very sad day.
How did the beer get infected? Well, there are a number of possible factors that may have lead to infection. 1. The brewery did not sanitize their bottles and caps during filling. 2. The cap was faulty and let airborne bacteria in; 3. Improper storing of product by the distributor and/or retailer; 4. Improper storage by the consumer(me).
Since I did not follow the breweries suggestions on proper storage I’ll take the blame this time, but my working hypothesis is that this particular bottle had been sitting around for quite awhile and had caught a bug sometime during its sit on the shelf at the bottleshop where I purchased it from.
Moral of the story: Store your beer cold or at the very least in a temperate environment where the temperature does not fluctuate drastically.
*Bottle conditioned means that the beer is naturally carbonated by adding sugar to the beer so the yeast can eat the sugar and therefore produce carbon dioxide or “extra bubbles”.
Beer Burps 