As a lad of 18 and a college freshman, several years ago, I decided I wanted to make beer, so that I could get around that whole pesky "drinking age" obstacle, the bane of my social life. I set myself up with some crude equipment and was soon an extract brewer, boiling concentrated wort on a hot plate in my dorm room and sprinkling water from a friend's bong in the hallway to mask the smell.
Sadly, the brilliant mind that hatched this scheme came fully equipped, right from the factory, with a really big mouth. So it wasn't long before The Authorities were onto me. To provide myself with a plausible story in case someone spotted me swigging from one of my bottles, I started brewing homemade soda pop as well.
One fine day, I opened my dorm-room closet and discovered that I had overprimed my soda. It was in two bottles -- a Little Kings Cream Ale glass bottle and a 2-liter soda bottle. The soda bottle had grown about three inches and developed a rather large tummy. It looked like it was ready to burst.
First, I got the Little Kings bottle out very gingerly and dropped it out the dorm-room window onto the rooftop outside. I wanted nothing to do with exploding glass.
But then I got to looking at that 2-liter bottle. And thinking the kind of thoughts that get a fellow into trouble.
I took the bottle and dashed up the stairs to the top of the four-story dorm, into the bathroom and over to the window, which I opened. There, below me, was a broad courtyard of cement. To my left was the entry to the dorm cafeteria; across the courtyard from me was Spiller Hall, a girls' dorm.
No one was coming. So I hurled the bottle at the ground as hard as I could.
Boing -- boing -- boing-boingboing. The bottle bounced like a soccer ball. Most unsatisfying. I raced down the stairs, retrieved it and tried again.
Boing -- boing -- boing-boingboing. OK, I thought. One more try and I'll REALLY throw it HARD this time.
I fetched it back upstairs. I hauled off. I sent that bottle hurtling at the ground so hard I imagined it would chip the concrete.
Now, keep in mind, this was 1986, and almost all 2-liter bottles were capped with aluminum caps. The one I had just thrown at the ground was one of the early exceptions, and it was closed with one of the now-familiar plastic kind of cap. And on this throw, the bottle landed cap down. Upon striking the ground, the cap shattered , the bottle's contents surged out, and the bottle took flight.
It rose majestically about 10 feet into the air and headed straight for Spiller Hall. Horrified, I watched as it screamed at the dorm like a Sidewinder locked onto a MiG, then at the last second hung a hard right and "buzzed" past three dorm-room windows on the second floor before dropping, spent, into a laurel bush. The entire courtyard was filled with the stench of overly yeasty ginger ale. And I do mean "stench."
In the middle window, I saw a girl reaching for the window latch -- presumably to open the window and ask me what the hell I was doing. Just as she reached for the window latch, my bottle blasted past her window, generously anointing it with yeasty, sour, rank ginger ale. She opened her window, looking rather like someone who's just been shot at and missed, and informed me wrathfully that I was extremely lucky she hadn't opened the window a second sooner. Stunned and rather expecting to be arrested at any moment, I agreed.
Well ... that's my only bottle bomb story. I can't really recommend this to anybody, but it was a helluva sight ...
