$#!& Gushers!

Dammit!  We finally had our first case of contamination.  Spoils your beer and your fun!  What we have here is commonly called a 'gusher infection'.  Somewhere during the bottling process our beer got contaminated with a foreign yeast or bacteria, and it continued eating the complex sugars in the beer that our yeast would not.  This beer was primed with malt sugar to be carbonated very, very lightly, but the foreign bacteria produced a whole lot of CO2 as it ate our precious dextrins (the long chain sugars that yeast cannot ferment, and give sweetness and body to finished beer).  The result can be seen in this video!  Aside from nearly explosive quantities of carbonation, the beer became extremely thin bodied and bland as it aged.  Sadly, I had to dump about 3L of our bottled SMaSH Bitter as the taste declined and the chances of the bottles exploding increased (a legitimate concern, Google 'homebrew bottle bombs' for some depressing imagery).  My anal retentiveness about sanitation just doubled.