Not a glass bottle bomb, but sort of a PET self propelled grenade type of thing instead.
OK. I'm down to the last two bottles of my first AG batch and I decide that this morning, just home from night shift is the time to have one of them. However, because I got the priming wrong, the whole batch is flat as a tack in the bottle. I have solved the problem by building myself some carbonation caps using schrader valves and the nice tough caps that come with the PET botttles you get when you buy a Coopers brand home brewery kit. Combine this with one of the coopers PET bottles and a schrader filler attached to my mini (sodastream) C02 bottle. No regulator, you just give it a quick squirt. Cold flat beer into bottle, squirt of C02, shake, repeat as required and allow to settle. and you have carbonated beer in 5 minutes flat.
Well, thats how its worked up until this morning anyway.
I'm a couple of steps into the process, air purged from bottle, beer into bottle, cap screwed on tight. I whack a squirt of C02 into the bottle and I'm about to shake it up when the microwave goes "ding" to let me know my dinner is ready. I grab it out of the oven and stick it on the table to eat after I fizz up my brew.
Back to the bottle, "I'll just whack in a squirt of C02" Spot the mistake???
So I give it another squirt, and because I'm a little tired and distracted, its a bigger squirt than usual. There is a godalmighty bang and suddenly I am covered in beer and there seems to be terrible pain coming from my right hand.
Reconstructing the event. Heres what I think happened.
1. Stupid Thirsty over pressurises PET bottle causing it to blow up.
2. It blows up in a very specific way. The bottom blows out. Like this
3. A pint of beer goes out the back end of the bottle.... rather quickly. Being significantly lighter than the departing beer, and obeying Mr I. Newton's rather uncompromising laws, the PET bottle heads off in the opposite direction to the beer.... even more quickly. Quickly enough in fact, that when what is now effectivley a beer bottle shaped bullet, tipped with a stainless schrader valve no less, impacts with my right hand. It does this to the bottle. Remember, the valve started out in the cap !!!
Needless to say, it has a somewhat detrimental effect on my hand also. Only a small amount of blood, and no broken bones, but it is now half again as big as it used to be and I am typing this with my left hand only....
The really terrible part, is that not only did I waste one of the remaining 2 bottles of my first AG brew (well, some of it went in my mouth) BUT even worse, my wife told me I'd blow my damn self up one day; and now I have to admit she was right
Bugger it
Thirsty
