From: jtn@nutter.cs.vt.edu (Terry Nutter)
Newsgroups: rec.food.historic
Subject: Re: Mead recipes?
Date: 28 Aug 92 17:53:05 GMT
Followup-To: rec.org.sca

Hi, everybody, from Terry.  Brad Armitage quoted me, and said,

>>And someday I'll tell you all about the Incredible Fragged Bathroom.  These
>>days, I put my bottles inside a rubber trash can with a latching top, with
>>the trash can in the basement bathroom tub.  But these days I also don't
>>get many exploders.
>
>WOULD LOVE TO HEAR THIS!!! :)

Well, OK, here's the short version.  I was young and innocent, and making a
batch of about 10 largish glass bottles (about 20 oz.) of a light (low alcohol, 
short fermentation) mead.  This is before I really understood that in these 
contexts, "yeast" does not mean "Fleischman's".  So I boiled my mix, cooled 
it down, added some -- bread -- yeast, let it set a few days, then bottled it.  
I'd done this before, but using smaller bottles.  After the fact, it was 
obvious that if you increase volume and surface area without making the glass
thicker or otherwise stronger, you wind up with a weaker container; but first, 
I demonstrated it empirically....

This method has the mead finish fermenting for about 2 weeks in the bottle.
I always knew that you might get some broken bottles, and the person who
first told me how to go about brewing suggested setting the bottles in the
bathtub during this period, to contain breakage.

So I put the bottles in the bathtub, and let them sit, in the back, essentially
spare bathroom upstairs in the townhouse I was living in.  The stairway went
up the center of the townhouse, opening at the front upstairs, with the master
bedroom and it's bath to the right.  The bathroom was at the opposite end; you 
went around to the left, down the corridor to the back, and there was the door.

The mead had been doing its thing about a week and a half when I went to
my mother's for three days over Thanksgiving.  When I got back, and went
upstairs (my bedroom was to the right of the stairway), I saw glass on the
floor.

Oops.  Where did that come from?

I turned the corner to the left.  The carpet was _covered_ with glass fragments.
Like a second carpet.  Little known fact: when mead explodes, some of the mead
converts directly to energy; then a secondary conversion turns that back into
matter in the form of little pellets of glass, accounting for the _tremendous_
volume of glass pellets in proportion to the original size of the bottles....
/B^}

Anyhow, I took one look, and somehow inferred that this was a Bad Sign.  And
it came to me to wonder, if the hall looked this bad, how bad the _bathroom_
looked.

Oh boy.

There were, of course, no intact remaining bottles.  I apparently discovered
a perfect formula for mead-chain-reaction explosion.

There was stuff that had been going to be mead _everywhere_ that could be
reached by either straight-line-trajectory or dripping from same, which was a
pretty disgusting mess, as it was no longer either honey or mead but something
with all the worst tendencies of both and sour to boot; but the glass damage was 
_much_ more impressive.

There were chunks out of the enamel of the bath enclosure.  There were chunks
out of the plaster of the walls.  There were chunks out of the (open) wooden
door.  There were chunks out of the _ceiling_.

It took me about two months of very hard, repeated work to get all the glass
shards out of that bathroom.  When I was done, it kind of looked like someone
had set off a grenade, and then carefully eliminated all signs of smoke, etc.
Until I moved out, I used to give tours of The Incredible Fragged Bathroom,
combined with warnings about brewing, bread yeast, large not-strong-enough
glass bottles, and what might have happened if anyone had been anywhere on that
half of the upstairs when the explosion took place.

When I moved out, I did understand why I didn't get all my security deposit
back....

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!

That is the short version of the Tale of the Incredible Fragged Bathroom.

Cheers,

Terry Nutter     Blacksburg, VA     jtn@vtopus.cs.vt.edu     (703)552-1598
Newsgroups: rec.food.historic