In remembrance of beers lost AND the coolest thing on YouTube (not involving leprechauns)
Two completely unrelated topics (aside from the fact that they're both about beer) that I just had to post about...
FIRST: My buddy Kevin over at Noble Square Brewing shared a tragic story about five gallons of Bockbier which he lost while force-carbonating a keg. Turns out there was some leak in the keg, and as a result the CO2 didn't push bubbles into the beer... it pushed beer out of the keg and on to the floor. The funny (by which I mean sad) thing is that I had the same thing happen to me almost three years ago. This got me thinking... How many gallons of beer have I sacrificed on the way to becoming the brewer that I am today?
Sadly, that's a mixture of beer and Oxyclean in that there wet/dry vac.By my count, it's fifteen gallons. Five gallons of Kölsch-style ale which died the same noble death as did Kevin's Bockbier (a bad poppet, for the record; now I always keep a cobra tap on any keg I'm carbonating). Next I lost five gallons of American Red/Amber Ale (tentatively named "Red Line Ale") that is the only batch I've lost to poor brewing technique--I believe I fermented at too high of a temperature, leaving a nasty Band-aid phenolic flavor. Finally, I lost five gallons of Irish Red Ale (something about the Reds, I suppose) in the Great Wort Chiller Incident of 2008.
Overall, I guess fifteen gallons lost out of roughly 275 gallons brewed isn't too bad. But I'll tell you what, at the time I wasn't too happy about losing any of those batches.
SECOND: Via Ron Pattinson's blog, behold the coolest non-leprechaun-related* video ever uploaded to YouTube:
*If you don't know what I mean by "non-leprechaun-related," go to this post and scroll to the bottom.
posted by Chibe at 7:43 PM
4 Comments:
Thanks for the sympathy and the link. I did have the beer line hooked up, but the quick connect must not have been on all the way. Having a cobra tap connected wouldn't have helped me--in fact, it may have been the cobra tap that was connected.
What about the mini keg that exploded in your Bridgeport kitchen? I think you forgot that one :-)
Dawn has a very good point. There was also the mini-keg disaster at Casey and Keri's apartment, though I don't know as that lost much beer in terms of quantity. It just lost enough to blow your baseball hat off your head.
Okay, okay, I'll add 1.25 gallons to my total! For the record, I thought of the mini-keg but decided to exclude incidents that were less than five gallons.
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