[Sca-cooks] Blowing up Fermenters (Was: Entertaining stories for Lainie)

[CorwynWdwd at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/20/2002 9:30:08 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
craig.jones at airservices.gov.au writes:

> Drakey blows up plastic fermenter in bathroom

 Did something similar there... in the kitchen. I was trying to carbonate
some hard cider in a two liter coke bottle. I figured it could handle the
pressure. It COULD have if it weren't for the wild yeasts that were working
in the cider.

See, wild yeasts will take advantage of sugars that domesticated yeasts
won't. This is an important safety tip.

My Wife woke me saying she heard a noise. "What noise?" "I don't know, but it
was loud enough to wake me..." So taking rattan in hand I went to investigate.

Got to the kitchen and stepped into a puddle of cider. The bottle had
exploded. Not sprung a leak... not popped open, exploded. Later I found the
halves of the bottle, turned completely inside out. The top of the bottle
left a coke bottle cap sized hole in the ceiling.

Understand, I'd vented the bottle regularly, thinking that the fermentation
was slow enough to gauge when it was about to stop and put the whole mess in
the fridge. I carried that bottle to every brewing class I did for a few
years, as a warning to budding brewers.

I was cleaning cider out of strange places in the kitchen a month later <G>.
Apparently an explosion of that size vaporizes a LOT of the liquid.

Corwyn




Thought for the day: There's a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental
illness."