Timed out waiting for operation - Memcached error

Question

Getting this error most of the time with memcached:

Caused by: net.spy.memcached.internal.CheckedOperationTimeoutException: Timed out waiting for operation - failing node: /127.0.0.1:11211

For this code:

private byte[] cacheGet(String key) {
    try {
        if(mc == null) {
            ConnectionFactory factory = new ConnectionFactoryBuilder()
                    .setProtocol(ConnectionFactoryBuilder.Protocol.BINARY)
                    .setFailureMode(FailureMode.Redistribute)
                    .setOpTimeout(MEMCACHED_TIMEOUT) // 60 seconds
                    .build();
            ms = new MemcachedClient(factory, AddrUtil.getAddresses(Arrays.asList(MEMCACHED_CONN, MEMCACHED_CONN_2)));
        }
        Object value = mc.get(key);
        return (byte[]) value;
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        mc.shutdown();
        mc = null;
    } finally {
        //mc.shutdown(); // needed?
    }
    return null;
}

My current solution is to restart the memcached server and problem solved, everything works fine again, cache works, however is there a way to handle this gracefully such that for the next hit it would work if this is only a client error or is this a unrecoverable memcached server error?