Text 1159, 74 rader
Skriven 2007-06-27 08:00:00 av Miles Maxted (3:772/1.0)
     Kommentar till en text av David Williams
Ärende: Re: Freezing
====================
G'morning David,

 DW> Some of our corks were not wired sufficiently well during the
 DW> fermentation. We had the bottles in the basement, below the living
 DW> room. Several tiems, we heard a bang, a hissing noise, then a
 DW> tremendous blow agains the underside of the floor. A cork had blown
 DW> out, and the bottle had shot up like a rocket, hitting the floor.

That brings back memories.

My father was a research engineer at BTH Rugby, Warwickshire, and 
had become part of a gang of Commonwealth engineer scholarship 
holders who had been harvested by BTH.

Two of the Australasian boffins had had experience making hone- 
brew beer,  and some how engineered permission from my mother to 
use our cellars to put down a mix - an amazing process which had 
me gobsmacked.  

They'd lost a brew to exploding bottles and were determined not to 
repeat that experience.  Having bemused me by boiling six large 
beer bottles upstairs in the kitchen,  they got me outside mixing 
conrete and sand on a 3-ply board with a spade - folding and 
shuffling the grey mess until they gave cries of approval.

The bottles were crowned and stood in a wooden box with an inch of 
wet concrete,  and then packed with the frightening fudge until 
only the neck-ends and tops were uncovered.  They also set two big 
bolts into the concrete - heads down, vaselined screw-ends up.

Two days later they came back to cook up their hops and stuff, 
stinking out the kitchen and pantry in the process so badly that 
John,  the houseman,  refused to go near those rooms for 24 hours.

Everything was carried down to the cellars,  and the liquid was 
decanted, filtered and fed into the six bottles.

They knocked the caps on again with care,  drilled holes in a big 
slab of wood and bolted it down on top of the six caps,  chuckling 
and boasting of their engineering approach.  Then they carefully 
stowed the heavy box in the furthest corner of the coal cellar, 
where light and fresh coal deliveries could'nt possibly reach it.

I used to go down into the spare cellar room to carry on building 
a big balsa glider that had captured my imagination,  and made a 
point every day of checking `the box' for signs of progress until 
that proved boring.

And then one night notable for its lack of air-raid sirens, an 
enormous boom made my bedroom shake a bit ... and then silence.   
We searched the house and garden for incenderary bombs without 
success,  and finally crawled back into bed hoping we had'nt 
missed anything.

After school next day,  I went down into the cellars to continue 
covered the wing of the glider with tissue-paper ... and nearly 
vomited at the smell that greeted me.  Investigation showed that 
the wooden box had burst apart,  a spread of grey concrete chunks 
and brown glass radiating from the far corner amid puddles of goo 
reaching into the pile of coke and coal.

The boffins' brew had bombed-out again...

Miles

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