Um, it's top shelf. I'll let you taste it April Fool's Day. J/K.
i want to taste it, please bring a bottle!
One of the bottles was a complete gusher. Wonder why? That was weird, because the other's have all seemed sort of (but not completely) flat.
how did you prime the bottles - add sugar to a bottling bucket? or did you use carb drops (sugar "pills" added to each individual bottle)?
if you added sugar to the entire batch in a bucket, i strongly suspect that the sugar wasn't evenly distributed. that gusher would be one of the last bottles you filled, i.e. from the bottom of the bottling bucket where all the sugar was. the majority of bottles would be under-carbed because their contents came from above the sugar sludge and had less (insufficient) sugar in them. implication: you may yet have other late-filled gushers. solution to this problem, for next time: 1) boil the sugar in little water first (sanitizes it and gets it liquefied) and add it to the bucket before you rack (transfer) the beer in, and 2) when you rack in, get a swirl/whirlpool going by putting the end of the tube along the edge of the bucket's wall. that should get things mixed up nice and even. to be extra-certain, sanitize a stainless spoon and give the beer a very gentle mix once it's full, or mostly full.
aside: avoid splashing the finished beer. keep the end of the tube below the surface of the beer, fill from below. after fermentation is done, you want to limit oxygen exposure as much as possible.
the other reason why you might have only one gusher (or just a few) out of an entire batch is that there was some source of infection inside that bottle, it wasn't sanitized properly, etc. if this is what happened to you here, then you under-primed all the bottles (hence general flatness) but the one bottle with an infection got extra carbonation from a bug (brett, wild yeast, etc) that fermented the long-chain sugars that the brewer's yeast (sacc) didn't. did you taste the gusher? infected beers often taste very thin and/or phenolic (spicy) if not out-right bad.
now if every bottle is a gusher, then your issue is either infection acquired before bottling, or premature bottling - fermentation wasn't complete and it finished in the bottle,
and yes, i'm aware of the potential sexual innuendo here.
Looking forward to doing a batch of something a bit more hop-forward, probably next month.
cool, let me know if i can help
protip: if you get a kit, buy some extra hops. add an additional ounce or two at the end of the boil, and another 1-2 extra ounces to the dry-hop. adds to the cost but it's worth it
