Somewhere between 1987 and 1990 I stopped in the only homebrew shop in Northwest Florida and bought an Irish red ale "kit" (a can of malt extract with a pack of dry yeast taped to the top under a thick film of dust.
I took it home and followed the directions. after two or three weeks - much longer than the prescribed fermentation period - I transferred (poured) the beer into a secondary. Since I had not seen the foam I'd been told would appear on top of the beer, I went back to the shop.
the proprietor assured me all was working perfectly, but that because I had not transferred the beer on time I would need to add yeast so the beer would carbonate. Re-yeasted the beer and bottled. A couple of weeks later I heard a dull, distant explosion; no problem, we live hear a large Air Force munitions testing base. We hear such things all the time. A week or so after that, I noticed beer running out under the pantry door. Yep, the original pack of yeast was dead; probably had been dead for five years, but the second pack worked like a charm!
Obviously I needed to get the pressure down. I moved all the bottles to the kitchen sink and poured ice on top. No doubt the ice was cooling the bottles and therefore lowering the pressure. Unfortunately, the ice was not cooling the bottles evenly; the uneven cooling stressed one bottle enough that it exploded, sending a shard of glass into the back of my arm.
A quick trip to the ER and two sutures later, I opened the surviving bottles and poured the beer back into the fermenter. When I bottled the batch a second time everything worked beautifully and the beer was ... not as bad as you might expect.
