I’ve been afraid to ask this even though it has happened to me several times in my life. I just laugh and try to alleviate the mess where I can.
In: Physics
The phenomenon is called “cavitation”: the bottle suddenly moves downwards while the beer inside doesn’t (because of inertia), this causes the formation of a vacuum on the bottom of the bottle. Beer contains CO2, which is a gas, and it is immediately forced out of the liquid to fill the vacuum; now, gases don’t need much space when dissolved in a liquid, but once you force them out of their solvent, they start to push (gases always tend to expand as much as they can) and that’s why beer starts coming out of the bottle.
If the gas in the liquid is not enough to fill the vacuum, the liquid violently collapses back in its place. The force of the implosion can even shatter the bottom of the bottle.
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