I would have thought some doper would have asked this question by now but I did a search and could find no thread even vaguely related.
When I was overseas cold beer was a rarity. In fact we got in the habit of regularly drinking warm beer. We actually took something of a poll and decided the best warm American beers were Falstaff and Schlitz (we figured that they couldn’t be any worse).
Anyway, one day some Seabees showed up in camp and we gave them some of our beer and after consuming large quanities of brew, they told us if we had some aviation fuel they could chill our beer. I was known to be good at “finding” things so I was sent off, with some help, to “find” some aviation fuel. I did and by the time I got back to the basketball court, where we were hanging out at the time there sat a small drum inside a larger metal drum. The smaller drum was packed tightly with beer. As I remember it even had a top on it. The space between the two drums was basically waiting for my aviation fuel.
They filled the space between the two drums with the fuel, got behind a bunker tossed a mini-molatov cocktail (made from one of those little airline booze bottles filled with gasoline, I think) into the fuel and “KABOOM!”
The Seabees waited a few minutes, went running up to the drums and started handing us incredibly cold beer.
Sorry to take so long in getting here, but how did it work? I was gone for much of the construction. Was there something special in the way it was built? Or was there something at the bottom of the barrel of beers or what? I’ve been wanting to know for years.
When I took a tour of the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen, Denmark, the guide said that “chilling a beer too much kills the taste… which is why American beer is usually served ice-cold.”
One way the equation will work is this: Put the beer in a 55-gallon drum (actually, a keg). Put aviation fuel (JP-4 or Jet-A) into an unpressurized airplane (leave the heater off). Put the keg of beer in the airplane. Fly the airplane up to 30,000 feet and stay there until the beer is cold.
Evaporation of a low vapor pressure liquid (such as aviation fuel) would cause temperature to decrease in the container holding the fuel and if you packed everything properly you could conceivably cool your beer that way. On the other hand the heat added buy burning the fuel would seem to negate any effects of evaporation. I could see this working if you packed everything just the way you said and then pulled vacuum over the whole system. Perhaps it might be possible to burn the fuel in such a way that it evaporates but doesn’t heat the system on oxidation.
I suspect you’re almost dead-on, Sleepyhead. That amount of jet fuel would suck the oxygen out of the air near the tank almost instantaneously, causing the remaining jet fuel vapor to evaporate rapidly into the partial vacuum. The rapid evaporation would cool the container & its contents-I don’t know for sure how much, but I can well believe that the cooling exceed the heating from the flame.
This is brilliant. I’m going to have to try it! uh oh
When I was in Vietnam, the only way to get cold beer was to put ice in it like the locals do. eugh.
Quite true about beer being too cold though. Once it gets below about 3 degrees centigrade, your sense of taste becomes dulled. That’s why most crappy Aussie and US mainstream beer is served cold. That said, I love an icy cold beer when I’m really thirsty, but if I buy expensive beer, I’ll drink it slightly warmer. And British ales are heaven at about 5 or 6 degrees centigrade.
Not all “aviation fuel” is jet fuel. Jets, turboprops, and turboshaft helicopters do indeed use a fuel mixture called “Jet-A”, which is primarily kerosene.
However, piston-engine powered aircraft – such as most smaller helicopters, private planes, and older propeller-driven relics – use aviation gasoline, or “avgas”. The most popular avgas is “100 LL”, which stands for 100 Octane, Low Lead. Note that “Low Lead” is a relative term: 100 LL avgas contains about 5 times as much lead as the old leaded varieties of automobile gasoline did. It’s only considered “low” lead because the original 100 Octane formulations of avgas contained ten times as much lead as leaded auto gasoline.
To clarify further, jet fuel (kerosene) is less volatile than avgas (gasoline). Someone once told me that jet fuel is about 50 octane. As tracer mentioned, avgas is usually 100 octane (do they still make 80 octane?). So evaporating avgas would have a greater cooling effect than evaporating jet fuel.
And for those shocked at the amount of lead in avgas: Remember that the engine on your typical Cessna is a design that dates back at least to the 1930s. More modern, more powerful, more efficient engines can be made, but there are two problems. First, certification of an aviation engine is extremely expensive. Current aircraft use current engines. New aircraft (i.e., a “modern design”) could use new-tech engines, except that there aren’t any. There are no new-tech engines because there are no airplanes to use them. Catch-22. (Lycoming, Continental and others, in association with NASA, are working on diesel aircaft engines however.) The other problem is reliability. Unlike in a car, where an engine failure is annoying but not necessarily dangerous, an aircraft needs to have as reliable engine as possible. If the engine fails, you’re in a life-threatening situation. Engine makers just don’t want to be the first to have their new-tech engine fail. Which would bring another problem: Liability. While there have been reforms relatively recently, anyone associated with aircraft – from the airframe maker to the engine maker to the business that rents it to a student, to the pilot himself – can be and has been sued after crashes. Even those parties who were clearly not at fault have been hit with massive judgements, awarded by juries who don’t understand or care why an airplane flies.
So the bottom line is, we’re stuck for the foreseeable future with old-tech engines that need to burn fuel that contains lead.
hey thanks buddy. I’m pretty sure that the change in heat associated with burning is greater than the change in heat associated with evaporation, so the actually burning has to take place away from the beer for there to be a net cooling effect. Here’s how I picture it: i) the fuel starts burning, ii) it sucks in air, iii) low pressure (partial vacuum) leads to massive evaporation of fuel (perhaps almost near instantaneous boiling) iv) fuel and air mix and form a giant fireball going way up into in the sky. This is a bit oversimplified and step iii is probably driven by iv, but the whole thing takes place pretty quickly.
If this is how it works it would be pretty cool to see. I imagine it would be tough to get it to work like this and half the time you would wind up blowing up you beer.
I don’t know if the “burning” drums would chill the beer to an icy temp or not, but I would suspect that you were had. We used a similar method in remote areas with just one drum that was tightly packed with beer along with a little liquid oxygen. In no time at all the LOX would evaporate off leaving ice cold brew. Although it would be a bit dangerous to mess with LOX around fuel, Seabees tend to enjoy stuff like that, especially when it involves suckering someone, and it would help explain the large and instantaneous explosion you described, rather than a fireball followed by continued burning or the fuel.
Using LOX is cheating. Besides cooling by evaporation it also cools the beer because it’s cold (by nature of being liquid at atmospheric pressure). If we’re going to assume these guys cheated (what the hell’s a seabee anyway?) then we might as well assume they snuck a couple bags of ice into the container.
Seabee stands for CB or the Navy’s Construction Battalion. You wanted something built under incredible conditions. You called the Seabees. As I remember their moto was, “If it’s hard we do it immediately. If it’s impossible, it may take us a little longer.”
Generally speaking, they were a bit older than the general run of the mill military personnel and had blue collar experience from back in the states. And yes, they had senses of humor, but boy could they build.
They are the Navy guys that storm the beach after the Marines have cleared it and moved inland. The Seabees generally build shit. Barracks, landing strips, etc. Useful little buggers and usually quite handy to have around.
The Seabee mascot is a bee diving into action wearing a sailor’s “dixie cup” cover. It carried tools bore building and a Thompson sub-machine gun as its “sting” – They build and they fight. They’re know for several acts of heroism. One that I vaguely recall is that a Seabee attacked Japanese (?) attackers with his tractor and used his bulldozer blade as a shield.
