11/29/2008: "Louder than Bombs"

So around 12:30 last night, right after Lynnea fell asleep we were rather abruptly awakened by an incredibly loud bang. My first thought, as the adrenaline started flooding my system, was "Is someone taking a battering ram to our front door, perhaps to come in and kill us for some reason?" followed about a quarter of a second later by "Oh, wait, that came from the cooler."

Yep. I gots me a cooler full of bottle bombs. If you've ever hung around homebrewers very much you may have heard the term bottle bomb thrown around. It's when, for some reason or other, the pressure in a bottle of beer gets way too high, and the bottle actually explodes. They used to be way more common, back in the dark ages of homebrewing, before people knew about things like sanitizing and before there were books and things written on the subject.

Now, I had assumed that "exploding bottles" was perhaps a bit of hyperbole, that really the cap blew off and beer went everywhere, not that the bottle itself actually exploded into tiny bits with enough force to actually embed small pieces of glass in the sides of the cooler. But explode it does. And it's a hideous mess to clean up. I can only imagine if it hadn't been in the cooler.

As to why I now have bombs instead of beer, the truth is... I uh... bottled it 1.020. *cough*. But it tasted very dry and I just thought all the insoluble starches from the pumpkin were raising the gravity reading. So, yeah. Don't bottle before the beer is done fermenting. That is all I have to say on the subject.

So then, what to do with the remain 260oz (7x12oz bottles and 8x22oz) of potentially incredibly dangerous beer? Dump it? The problem is that is the Pumpkininny! (I guess I shouldn't have added that exclamation point to the name) is good. Really quite good. I would call myself a fan. So I have opted for the alternative solution. Keep it cold (prevents explosion) and drink it as fast as humanly possible. And don't hold the bottles anywhere near anyone's face.

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The bottle bomb really was frightening and the beer really is good! =)

[Lynnea] on Saturday, November 29th