The specific problem that came up is I have a 2 liter bottle of 7-up that fell from a height of about 5 feet. Thank goodness for plastic bottles.
My solution for when that happens is just leave it sit for at least 6 hours in the fridge. Open it slowly, which I always do.
It gets me a wondering if there is any general wisdom for opening a shaken or dropped fizzy drink? Whether it be a can, 2 liter or regular glass bottle, is there a difference?
Am I waiting too long? Is it fine as soon as the foam dies down?
Does it take days for the CO2 to reabsorb into the fluid?
Does it make a difference if it’s diet? What about beer?
How much of a difference does refrigeration make?
What’s the dope on this?
Has the government done a study?
I’ve done this at least a hundred times myself. There is no need to wait six hours. Just open the cap really slowly, as soon as you hear that “Pssss” sound stop turning the cap until the sound stops. Once it stops just open the bottle like you normally would.
Yeah snakes is right. Just let the excess build up of pressure seep out. Just do it slowly and let the pssss sound occur until it dies out. Same thing with cans. Just push the tab slightly, enough to crack, not enough to open the can and let the fizz explode.
I have a friend who says if you tap the top sides of the can a few time it won’t explode but I can’t testify to the effectiveness of that.
I use to work in a pizzeria and whenever we dropped filled soda bottles the owner would tell us to put them in the fridge and the bottles would be fine in ten minutes or less.
That is, that was how long it took for a customer to reach the back of the fridge, and nobody ever had the displeasure of explosive soda. I couldn’t tell you how long to wait but its definitely not six hours, or days.
Mythbusters did a thing on this. They showed a ‘magic trick’ where they shook up a can of coke, did a patter speech about how they could majik-ally fix the coke from fizzing, then opened it. The only ‘trick’ was to make the patter speech long enough that the fizz died down.
They explained that the sodas made nowadays have an additive to settle the fizz fast.
I saw this episode quite a while ago, so I’m going from memory, and might not have all the details, but essentially the point was you don’t have to wait very long before the soda fizz will subside.
That’s interesting about the additive thing. The other day I was having lunch at a place where they had self serve soda fountain. It took me all of three seconds to fill up my cup. Back in the day it took forever because you would fill it half way, wait for the fizz to go down then continue filling with a few more pauses in between.
If you have a two liter bottle (that is clear), then it is real easy. Just wait until there are no more bubbles. It is the bubbles that make it geyser.
When the bubbles are finely distributed throughout the liquid, you will get the biggest geyser because as you relieve the pressure, each of the bubbles will expand. If they are surrounded by liquid, they will force the liquid up as well as act as initiation sites for new bubbles.
In a minute or so, all of the bubbles from the shaking will have risen to the top of the liquid. This will geyser some, but only the bubbles will escape. In just a few minutes, however, you will only see a thin layer of bubbles around the neck. This will not geyser.
Shaking the soda does not make the CO2 come out of solution as long as the pressure remains the same. All it does is make lots of small bubbles. If you release the pressure while these small bubbles exist, they will all expand at once, which will cause turbulence that creates initiation sites for new bubbles, and so on, until enough CO2 has come out of solution.
I’ve seen people tap on top of beer/pop cans that have been dropped and open them within 15 seconds with no disastrous results; maybe a nickel sized bubble of foam out the top. Maybe the vibration helps redissolve the CO2 back into solution.
