Beer Explosion: Part Deux

We've had another accident at the plant... similar to the first Beer explosion, but on a lesser scale. The first one happened in March, '06 if you care to check the archives. I'm stil sad that there's no pictures of the prior explosion, since it was much messier than this one.

Early yesterday morning, whilst the wifey and I tried to sleep, we were awakened by a crash from the kitchen. We both lay there and went through various scenarios in our heads like, "was that the world's most clumsy burglar?" "Did the cat just eat an entire lasagne?" "How could a whole Jewish Wedding go on in the kitchen, and we only hear the end?"

I went to the top of the stairs and heard what I thought was the cat licking something up.... but then she stuck her head around the corner, looked up at me, and then looked into the kitchen. I guess she was not to blame.

Went I got down to the kitchen, I immediately knew what had happened by the sad scene of beer carnage. Earlier in the week I had brought a few large bottles of homebrew up from the cellar. These 1.5 liter bottles were some of the ones that we were unhappy with, not that they were naughty, just that they tasted bad, or were undercarbonated and over-alchoholed. (I know what you're thinking, "over-alcoholed?" Well, it's possible, I assure you.) These six large bottles were sitting in the kitchen, on The Green Mile, waiting for me to remember to pop them open and feed them to the fishes. One of the bottles that was not undercarbonated, once out of the fermentation-slowing fridge, started carbonating with some of the left-over yeast. The warm kitchen air slowly worked its magic and induced an explosion of the sealed bottle. Interestingly the cap did no blow off, it was the glass bottle itself that failed to contain the pressure.

Luckily, only one bottle blew its top and the others were not so distraught as to follow suit. Not only that, but the bottle was on the island in the absolute center of the kitchen, so no walls were injured in the explosion. The wifey was none-to-pleased of course, but it was not that hard to clean up. I bit the bullet and spent from 3:45 - 4:00 Saturday morning mopping and picking uptiny bits of glass. It would never do to have the cat drunk and picking glass out of her paws all weekend.