This happened, of course, in college. Pull up a chair…
I was sharing an apartment with three women one summer. One of my roommates, Katie, had…well, a certain fondness for alcohol. Being a penurious college student, she decided that it would be a Good Thing ™ to save money on liquor, so she decided to experiment with making her own booze.
She proceeded to do this by emptying a 16-oz glass Pepsi bottle, rinsing it out, and filling it not quite two-thirds of the way with canned cling peaches in heavy syrup, sorta cramming the peach slices down through the neck of the bottle. She then added a few tablespoons of sugar and a full packet of baker’s yeast. (I was watching this whole process, my jaw dropped in horror, but she assured me that I wouldn’t have to drink it if I didn’t want to.) She then screwed the cap down tight and left the bottle on one of the shelves in the kitchen.
Now, this was during summer in upstate New York. During a hot summer in upstate New York. It’s not like the Southwest, but it was still pretty toasty.
I tried to put the experiment out of my mind and let Katie deal with it on her own, but every so often I took a look at the bottle out of morbid curiosity. Nothing much happened that first day. The next day, the yeast had gotten started and the mixture was bubbling something fierce. The day after that, the bubbles had really risen noticeably. By the following day, a greyish-orange mixture of goop and bubbles completely filled the bottle. Katie’s assessment: “Wow, lookit that! This is gonna be good!”
By the following afternoon, however, things had changed. My buddy Jim (who’s a pretty good homebrewer) was visiting. He looked at the bottle (which I had been trying to ignore that day), then motioned me over to see. The bottle was no longer filled with bubbles–instead, the glass in the top half of the bottle was clean, and the surface of the peach/liquid mixture was absolutely flat, with no bubbles or peach chunks rising above the waterline. Jim and I turned to each other, our eyebrows raising simultaneously, and Jim asked, “Uhh…Katie…did you burp the peaches?”
Katie looked up from the game of solitaire she was playing at the kitchen table and replied, “Huh? Whaddaya mean?”
Jim: “Burp the peaches. Let the gas out.”
Katie: “What gas?”
Jim: “From the yeast.”
Katie: “Oh.”
[silence]
[cricket…cricket…]
Katie: “Uhh…no.”
Jim and I: “Oh shit.”
Me: “Katie, why do you think the bottle looks like that?”
Katie: “Ahh, it’ll be fine.”
It was at this point that Jim and I realized that we would have to be the ones to Burp The Peaches.
[insert ominous organ music]
Jim took the bottle down from the shelf, set it on the kitchen table, and twisted the bottlecap.
Nothing happened.
I then tried it.
Nothing happened. The cap refused to budge.
He then held the bottle in both hands while I focused on twisting the cap.
Nothing happened. It was like when you have a jar that’s really tightly vacuum-packed and you can’t open it. Except in this case the pressure was on the inside of the bottle.
Oh, great, I thought. I have a glass fragmentation grenade sitting on my kitchen table.
It was at this point that Jim and I realized that Steps Would Have To Be Taken.
[insert ominous organ music]
Now, Jim and I were in the SCA at the time. This is a medieval recreation organization, where one of the activities is to have people dress up in armor and beat each other with sticks as a form of recreating medieval combat. This meant that we had plenty of protective gear, so Jim and I proceeded to armor up, covering our torsos, arms, hands, and necks with heavy leather and steel, and then put on goggles and full-face shields that I’d earlier borrowed from the college metal shop. We then got a pair of good-size pliers from my toolbox, and carefully slid the bottle down to the end of the kitchen table. We knelt down to get as much cover from the table as possible. I held the bottle, while Jim carefully used the pliers to turn the cap.
Me: “Okay, go slow.”
Jim: [turns the cap a bit]
Bottle: [nothing]
Jim: [turns the cap some more]
Bottle: “ffffffff…”
Jim: [turns the cap a bit more]
Bottle: “…ffffFFFFFFFfffff.” [then stops hissing]
Me: “It stopped. Why’d that happen?”
Jim: “I dunno.” [turns the cap a little more]
Bottle: “fffff…” [the level of peach glop starts rising in the bottle as the pressure is relieved and it can expand]
Me and Jim: “Whew!”
Bottle: “…ffffffffffffSSHHPURRRGLLTTTPPPPBBHHHH”
Y’know how those glass Pepsi bottles had metal screw-on bottlecaps? And y’know how those bottlecaps had a row of tiny little holes around the top? Well, it turns out that if there’s enough pressure, peaches will fit through those holes. The bottlecap is now oozing peach puree.
Oh, great, I thought. It’s the Blob and it’s on my kitchen table. I’m about to be devoured by canned peachy goodness. This is gonna suck.
Me and Jim: “Whoa.”
Bottle: “SSHHURRRRRRLLLBB.”
Me: “It stopped again.”
Jim: “Weird.” [turns the cap a little more]
Bottle: “ssssssssssssPOP!”
[Jim and I hit the deck, our armor crashing against the linoleum as we attempt to become one with the flooring]
When we got up again and looked at the bottle…it was empty. And not just empty–it was dry on the inside.
We then looked around the kitchen, and there were peaches everywhere. There were peaches on the table. There were peaches on the floor. There were peaches on the refrigerator. There were peaches behind the refrigerator. There was a two-foot circle of peaches embedded in the tiles of the dropped ceiling. There were peaches on the shelves, on the stove, under the stove, in the sink, on the walls, on the windows, down the hall, in the bathroom where they’d have had to rebound off two walls to get in there.
We never did find the bottlecap.
