Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Super-Massive Beer Foul

You may recall the Massive Beer Foul that coated my laundry room with a couple pints of Leap Beer. Given that event, what followed on September 4th could only be called the Super-massive Beer Foul. The following is a nearly-verbatim excerpt from an email to a friend that day.

I was getting ready for work in the morning. As I'm about to put on my shoes, I notice that the corner of my coffee table looked a bit wet. I go over and touch it, and it's sticky. That's when the puddle in the kitchen caught my eye. My keg, nearly full of batch 3 of Snapping Ginger Ale (and the best one yet), had emptied itself. The tap had popped off of its hose sometime overnight. Spraying the walls, a bit of the ceiling, the furniture in about one third of the kitchen, and of course my kitchen floor. Half an hour of cleaning up, including using my Ryobi as a wet vac for the first time, and I was ready to head off to work. That evening I had to continue cleaning, of course.

I bought some more hose clamps, so that I can tighten the seal with the taps, and hopefully this sort of thing shouldn't happen again. Really, I should be tapping the kegs more frequently, so they don't keep building up internal pressure.

So, that's the Super-massive Beer Foul.

Now we must never speak of this again.

6 comments:

Julie said...

Irrational Fear #37: Things kept under intense amounts of pressure that might blow up somehow.

Can you imagine standing in that room when the blow out happened? I guess my worst-case fear would that you'd be shot through with a fast-flying piece of exploding keg. Being bathed in beer just would've been funny.

Mike Marsh said...

Had I been there, I could have prevented most of the loss. That's what happened with the Massive Beer Foul. Being bathed in beer wasn't exactly funny (and Marco can back me up on this), but it's a lot better than losing an entire batch.

The real secret to avoiding a blow-up like this is to tap the keg frequently. Oh, sure, you could also let out some of the pressure, but who wants to do that when you can tap the keg?

Mike Marsh said...

To whoever is posting political comments anonymously here:

1) Lighten up.

2) Please don't piss in my pool. This blog is about homebrewing.

Anonymous said...

Then leave your political comments to your self.

Dave's is not the place either.

Mike Marsh said...

Dude, it was just a stupid joke. Do you complain to the people who made Hillary jokes too?

Anonymous said...

Stupid may explain you, but I know for a fact that Dave's is not the place for your political comments.