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

[Gorgeous Muiredach]

At 09:52 PM 6/20/2002, you wrote:
>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.

Oh! Oh! Oh!

Did something like that once!!!  In my beer brewing days, I had decided to
try to make Kvash (rye beer).  Everything went well, up to the point of
adding a little bit of sugar in the bottle, which I've always done with
regular beer.  But the Kvash called for putting in two dried grapes
(raisins???) in the bottle.  So I followed the recipe and capped
everything, put it in boxes and in the brewing room.

Three weeks later, as we're laying on the sofa watching tv, we hear this
huge rattle in the brewing room.  Chain like explosions...  The girlfriend
(of the time) and I looked at each other and said "oh shit".  We didn'
ttouch the door that room for another three days to make sure the
explosions had stopped!!!  By that time, when we went in, there was glass
shards all over, some imbeded in the walls and ceiling, some just firmly
glued to it with dried Kvash.  Miraculously, there were three bottles left
intact.  The get up I put on to throw them out was hillarious to look
at.  Katherine did take pictures, but she kept the pix when she walked out
on me (but that's another story).

Was thinking it would make a great weapon a la molotov coktail! ;-)

>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.

We *never* got rid of all the dried Kvash on the walls/ceiling!...


Gorgeous Muiredach the Odd
Shire of Forth Castle
Meridies
mka
Nicolas Steenhout
"You must deal with me as I think of myself" J. Hockenberry