I found this on the net, thought it was worth sharing



Beer, Aloysius, and the Ducks

I got a circular for a brewing kit in the mail, and decided to give it a try. 5 gallon white poly bucket, can of extract, corn sugar, instructions, tubing and miscellany, all for $25. Sounded like a deal.
I went on a Grolsch beer binge for a couple of weeks to get enough of those bail-lidded bottles to keep from buying a capper, and finally my kit arrived.

Being the scientific sort, I memorized the instructions, and followed them to the letter. My sterilization techniques were lab-perfect, I boiled the wort for the exact prescribed amount of time, and I even went so far as to buy some spring water because the stuff out of my Cupertino tap just Wasn't Good Enough, and conventional wisdom, including most beer commercials on TV, had it that the water was a very important part of the deal.

I made up a wet yeast pitch, and had it ready. This was not part of the instructions, but I had done my homework, and I felt I had moved well past the kindergarten stage of beer making, and I should give it all I had.

I scientifically transferred the wort into the newly cleaned white poly bucket, dumped the yeast solution into the wort, put the top on the fermenter, slapped a thermometer and a homemade fermentation lock (courtesy of a college course in lab glass-blowing and a convenient propane torch) onto it, and checked on it every fifteen minutes for the next two days.

It began to bubble in a gratifying manner. And bubble. And bubble. And bubble.

Finally, 72 hours after it should have stopped converting sugar into ETOH and CO2, it sort of ground to a halt and sat there, emitting a bubble of gas every once in a while. I checked the specific gravity, and it seemed to be a bit high, but acceptable.

This is where I made my first, and nearly fatal mistake.

I opened up a couple of Grolsches in celebration of the end of the primary fermentation, drank them down (it was a hot day), and sat down to review the bottling instructions.

This, as you know, is the time for the secondary fermentation, where the wort and some extra sugar get put into the bottle, and the yeast eats the remaining sugar, produces some CO2, and this is where the carbonation in the beer comes from. The problem was to determine just how much extra sugar I would have to add to the wort before bottling. The instructions said just to add a half-teaspoon of corn sugar to each bottle, but this seemed like too much work, I thought I'd just add it in bulk, give it a good stir, and bottle it.

Gnarly says I, blurrily reaching for my slide rule (my calculator was in the other room, and it just happened to be handy), did the computation of teaspoons/bottle and bottles/batch, and came up with an amount of sugar that seemed too small by a factor of ten.

Losing a decimal place is easy to do on a slipstick, especially under the influence of a couple of beers, so I mentally adjusted the final sugar weight, measured it out (it took all I had), dumped it into the wort, and bottled it.

The bottled wort seemed to be producing CO2 at a gratifying rate, so I shoved the bottles into an unused corner of the garage, and started to wait out the aging period, which was to be about six weeks.

The first premonition I had that something was wrong was two days later, when I got a call from the Sheriff's Department, wondering why my neighbors were hearing explosions from my garage. At first I dismissed this as paranoia, people hunt deer illegally in the foothills from time to time, and my neighbors had never really recovered from the effects of a series of rather unfortunate experiments involving metallic sodium and hot air balloons, and they tended to blame everything from sonic booms to minor earthquakes on me.

Not without some justification, I might add.

I assured the police that I was not building munitions or testing explosives in my rented garage, at least not this time, and that I would survey the area carefully upon my arrival home, and correct whatever it was that seemed to be erupting there.

When I got into the garage, I noticed a strong green beer smell, which seemed to indicate that I had messed up at least one, and maybe more, bottles. I thought perhaps I'd neglected to seal a couple of bottles properly, and that accounted for the smell.

There did seem to be an unreasonable amount of shattered glass in the area, though, and I didn't remember dropping any bottles in the garage.

I decided that it was time to examine the bottles more closely, and wandered over to that part of the garage.

At that point, I heard a THUMP, and felt something fly past my cheek.

I turned around to look at whatever it was, and a sliver of glass two inches long had embedded itself in the sheetrock behind me.

Clearly something over there was throwing glass around, but I still hadn't figured out just what was going on, and wasn't too keen about sticking my face or major arteries near where it was happening until it had demonstrably calmed down a bit.

I grabbed a nearby blanket and tossed it over the area of activity. It settled peacefully down on the bottles, and then jumped three feet straight up into the air.

And fell back down again. Plainly, whatever this was, was volatile, and strongly resented being disturbed.

This suggested a course of action. Treading lightly, I went into the house and got a beer, sat down, drank it, and contemplated the situation.

Relative peace seemed to have descended upon the garage for the moment, so I didn't feel like I had to resort to immediate measures.

My eye fell on the notes I'd made while making the beer, so I idly began reading them. I got to the place where I computed the amount of sugar necessary for the secondary fermentation, and the numbers seemed funny.

I rechecked them, and sure enough, I had put not just a little too much sugar in those bottles, I'd put in a whole lot too much. About a factor of ten, it seemed.

It then became apparent just what the pyrotechnics in the garage were all about; the CO2 produced by that much sugar produced too much gas pressure for the bottles.

The question now was: what to do about it? I couldn't exactly unbottle the stuff, or move it, so it would have to stay where it was, at least for the moment. I did need to keep it from annoying my neighbors and thus the Sheriff's Department, lest they call in the bomb squad.

The solution came in the form of a bunch of blankets, which I tossed as gently as I could over the remaining bottles.

This served to muffle the explosions and contain the resulting glass spray.

And so tranquility was restored to Merriman Drive.

A couple of months later, the blanket/bottle collection seemed to have quieted down, so after considerable prodding, I went in and sorted out the resulting mess. The blankets were a complete loss, so I donated them to Zilog's dumpster, along with several cases of broken bottles.

There were, however, a couple of bottles that had not given in to the urge to self-destruct, so as a reward, I gingerly took them into the kitchen and put them into the refrigerator, with a set of warning labels on them.

A couple of days later, my wife, having tired of putting on a hockey mask every time she wanted a cold drink, convinced me that those bottles would be better off out of the refrigerator.

I complied, but felt cheated somehow. I didn't really want to simply throw them away, they were all I had left of my inaugural beer run. On the other hand, they were sort of a time bomb.

I did the only thing I could do. I called my brother, and heartily invited him over for a beer. I suspect the "heartily" part gave me away.

"This isn't that Green Rooster shit you gave me last time, is it?", he asked.

Suspicion is disquieting in one so young.

Well, if truth be known, I had given him a few Green Roosters (wonderful beer, imported from Denmark, a full 13% alcohol by volume, and will rip the top of your head off if you aren't careful) the last time he was over, and had somehow neglected to inform him about the potency of what he was drinking. I must have gotten distracted.

Four Green Roosters later, I had to pick him up off my couch, snoring gently, and deposit him, still asleep, back at his apartment. His wife gets visibly nervous whenever she sees me with a bottle in my hand, even today, almost a decade later.

In any case, I digress.

My brother arrived, and I told him the story of the overly aggressive beer mixture, and the slight computational error that produced it, admonished him never to drink and derive (get it? I've been waiting ten years to use that one), and pointed him to the sink.

"Now, which of us is going to be brave enough to open that beer bottle?", says I, in my best elderly brother tone of voice.

Andy spent four years in the Navy, flying subchasers out of Moffett Field. He declined, which shows that the armed forces do instill a sort of instinct for self-preservation.

Since it was my beer, he reasoned, I should be the one to open it.

He had a point, so I advanced on the bottle, while he took cover behind a convenient table.

I covered my eyes, and flipped up the bail on the bottle. The resulting spray of fluid half emptied the bottle, and residual began to well up and sort of foam out of the top for a couple of minutes.

In the meantime, everything in the immediate neighborhood, including my sibling, was covered with a light coating of brown foam.

I tasted the foam that had gratuitously deposited itself on my upper lip, and it tasted much like, well, beer foam.

I cautiously poured the remainder into a couple of glasses, and was rewarded with six or so inches of foam riding on top of an inch of brown liquid.

My brother gave me one of those "I know you're pulling something on me, but I haven't quite figured it out yet" looks, and, without really committing himself, took a cautious sip. He then carefully spat it into the sink.

"Waitaminute, it can't be THAT bad", says I, and tried my own sip. Yes, it could, and it was, and heavily carbonated, too.

In chorus, we called out "Hey, Aloysius!". Aloysius, then a mere pup of eight months age, and not perhaps entirely aware of the various things that could happen to an innocent young dog in the household that had adopted her, thumped around the corner in an excess of puppy enthusiasm.

I poured her bowl full of brown foam, suffered through another shower when I opened the other bottle, and poured it as well. Aloysius seemed unsure, but curiousity got the better of her. I should note that these days, Aloysius is a much less trusting animal.

I cannot imagine why.

Now, this was not Aloysius' first encounter with beer. She first got into a mug of mine at about six months, and managed to drink down several ounces before I could stop her. She weaved around for a bit, went to sleep for a couple of hours, and awoke, apparently none the worse for the wear.

It was then that I found that dogs could snore.

In any case, I asked her if she was certain that she wanted the beer, and she indicated that she was, so I gave it to her, and stood back.

Aloysius slurped down all the beer in her bowl, and burped. With a look of anguish, she ran to the bedroom where my wife was trying to recover from a strenuous morning repotting plants or some such domestic shtick, and it was only a moment later that I was summoned thereto.

Aloysius was cradled, burping almost frantically, in my wife's arms.

"Did you teach the puppy how to belch?", it was demanded of me. This was a fair question, since I had developed a fondness for burping contests, which are a convenient thing to be fond of after drinking beer, and to some degree, inevitable.

"No, dear," I said truthfully, "I believe that it is impossible to teach a dog to belch, since that reflex is more or less a product of the autonomic nervous system, and thus not amenable to training. I could ring Mater up and check, if you like." Mumsy's degree is in zoology, but she'd been teaching Anatomy and Physiology of late.

She didn't buy it for a minute. Aloysius continued to burp. My brother began howling with laughter, and fell over on his back and began to kick his legs in the air, which added significantly to the manic disposition of the situation.

I received a stern lecture on the topic of using household pets for experimental purposes, and a secondary lecture on feeding things of an unknown nature to those same household pets, and didn't I feel ashamed of myself, treating a poor undeserving puppy like that, etc.

Aloysius eventually stopped burping, just before I was ordered to take her to the vet in expiation of my sins. My brother has not really stopped laughing about it, and it takes but the slightest reminder of the event to start him off again. As an apology to Aloysius, I took her swimming at the dam, and she got to chase some ducks, which is her favorite thing to do, although probably not the duck's.

Me, I use these things as lessons, and what I got from this one is that while it is sheerest lunacy to be an Aloysius in a household composed largely of overgrown adolescents, it is never dull, and every once in a while, because of it, you get to chase ducks.

Copyright 1994 James M. Putnam, All Rights Reserved