Legal brand sparkling cannabis-infused soda. Bottles like these were pulled from three stores due to a problem with exploding. (Mirth Provisions)

BELLINGHAM, Wash., Oct. 9 (UPI) -- A marijuana-infused soda was pulled from three Washington state stores after bottles started exploding on the shelves, the manufacturer confirmed.

Zach Henifin, manager of Top Shelf Cannabis in Bellingham, said his store received 330 bottles of Legal brand sparkling pomegranate soda, a marijuana-infused beverage produced by Mirth Provisions of Longview, and the next day employees started to notice the glass bottles exploding.


"It sounded like a shotgun going off," Henifin told KOMO-TV, Seattle. "You can actually feel it, it was that explosive."

Henifin said the bottles were placed in a steel box outside the store, where they continued to explode for the next 10 days.

"It's almost like bomb box because they randomly go off during the day," Henifin said.

The manager said no one in the store was injured, but he does not know what became of the 10 bottles sold to customers before the exploding problem was discovered.

Adam Stites, the founder of Mirth Provisions, confirmed two other stores, Main Street Marijuana and New Vansterdam in Vancouver, reported detonating bottles.

"It was simply the fact that his batch had a higher yeast concentration, and one of the by-products of yeast is excess carbon dioxide," Stites said.

He said the batch had been pressure tested and deemed to be safe, but "the yeast was just building up the pressure in the bottles over a seven to 10 day period."

Stites said the stores will be issued full refunds for the bottles they purchased.

"Sometimes when you're creating new products in new marketplace there's a little bit of a learning curve and that's what we've experienced," Stites said.