Homebrewers Impasse

PLAY AUDIO

Nephew James turned 21 last year. He took me up on my offer to live with us for a winter season, so he could be a ski bum – actually, a “rider” bum, a snowboarder-dude. This guy loves to have fun, he makes lots of friends fast, but he pushes the safety envelope a little far sometimes.

One of the primary fixations our 20-year old nephew had was about beer, and his impending “coming of age” to legally buy and consume it. When he watched me brewing my own, his life suddenly found direction. A compass of sorts. “Teach me to brew beer, please”, he begged. “I want to brew a batch of beer for my 21st birthday party.”
Not just a direction, but an short term goal! I knew I was going to enjoy getting to know my highly motivated young nephew, after all.
Watching him learn to ride a snowboard, and his simultaneous learning experience with telemark skiing, demonstrated James’ amazing athletic prowess. The first day I had him out on skis, he blew past me near the bottom of the run, and did a perfect imitation of the way I ski. “It took me 15 years to learn to ski that well,” I thought.
But James had a wee flaw, which I can only call over-confidence. Being the star player on his childhood baseball and soccer teams had given him a large impression of his abilities. A few minutes after James blew past me on the ski slope, he crossed his tips and fell at high speed, creating a 120-yard long “yard sale”. Unhurt, he stood and waited for me to bring him his gloves, ski poles and his other ski. I was glad helmets are considered cool, but I worry they amplify youth’s natural sense of indestructibility.
We worked out the timing for James’ beer, so it would be ready for his 21st birthday, which would be in late March, approaching the end of the Rocky Mountain ski season. He looked through my brewing log, and decided to brew my traditional holiday recipe, my “Drunken Pumpkin” spiced ale. Fresh pumpkins aren’t to be found in the store in January, so we settled on the canned version.
On brew night, I taught James to brew the same way I teach someone to ski. Take them to the top and shove off. I sat back and gave him instructions, but I let James do everything, right down to pitching the yeast, sealing the carboy and putting it away to ferment. He even cleaned up the mess we’d made in the kitchen.
James checked the carboy only a couple of times while it fermented. He was too busy partying with his Aussie friends, staying out late, drinking. Yes, our twenty-year old nephew had quickly learned that he could get into bars, clubs, even buy rum at a liquor store. He found that he could use the drivers license of a friend from Australia who looked like he could be James’ brother, while his pal used his passport to get in. All James had to do is adopt a convincing Australian accent, which of course he did, with amazing accuracy and grace. His guise worked like a charm, and he never got busted.
This only made him more confident. I could easily envision this coming out all wrong, and I didn’t want to send my nephew home to my brother damaged, or worse. On the other hand, I had told young James and his Dad at the beginning of the winter, that my wife and I were not going to play parents. It would be his responsibility to make his own decisions, and to live by their success, or their consequences.
“I’ll just give you my two Golden Rules,” I had told him, rules by which we had successfully raised our daughters, “the first rule is: BE SAFE. If you come to a fork in the road, and you wonder which choice to take, take the safest one.” I had to add just a little amplification for James, as I suspected this rule needed to be a little different for boys, than for girls. “When you crash, just make sure it isn’t too ugly.” I told him.
I told him the second rule was not so important for a guy on the edge of becoming a man, as it was for teeneage daughters. “Keep me informed of where you are, and where you’re going.” This was the rule our girls had learned to live by. I just told James to let us know if he would not be joining us for dinner, so we could cook less food. He almost never passed up dinner, so we always knew his wherabouts. He was either coming home for dinner, or he was leaving after dinner, to hop the bus back into town and “party hearty” with his pals. The bus would drop him a few blocks away at 2 am, he would stumble home to bed, get up at 6 am and go back to work, helping skiers load onto the chairlift. James could do this day after day for almost two weeks, then he would let a whole day pass while he slept like a stone.
When it came time to bottle the Pumpkin Ale, I directed James as he cleaned the sink and counter area, set up the sterile solution bucket and the bottling bucket, and arranged the bottles and tools for sterilizing.
Our strapping young nephew went into the bathroom to get the carboy of beer, just when the phone rang. It was my wife Jan, calling from a business trip in New York. I told her I would call her back in awhile, when we were calmly underway with the bottling operation.
She just had a couple things she needed to tell me. “Yes, yes, okay, okay,” I said, “I’ve got to go now, okay, I love you too, good-bye. Yes, yes, I’ll call you in about 45 minutes. Okay, okay, good-bye.”
Just as I was getting off the phone with Jan, James came into the kitchen with the carboy by the handle in one paw, holding the airlock bottle in the other, and he was picking up speed as he headed across the room to the counter.
“James, two hands, two hands!” I warned him as he swung the 5-gallon glass vessel up with youthful swagger, aiming for a smooth landing on the countertop.
There was the sickening smack of two massive objects meeting, the glass carboy and the wood countertop edge, followed by the simultaneous crash and splash of large shards of glass and gallons of liquid hitting the floor. A wave of foaming beer moved across the kitchen, splashing up the baseboards. The air was immediately thick with the smell of a delicious spiced pumpkin ale, now wasted.
“OH MY GOD!” I yelled, ‘TOWELS!!” I ran to the bathroom, threw open the cupboard door and grabbed every towel from the shelf, ran back to the kitchen and threw them all on the floor, then dove to my kness and started mopping. James, speechless, followed suit. I grabbed a 5-gallon bucket to wring the beer out of the towels.
We mopped for 20 minutes, until the floor was still wet, but all the free fluid was up. A quick look into the bucket at the gallon and a half we had actually gathered, raised in my mind only one question, “Where’s the rest of the beer?”
I went down the spiral stair to the basement, wondering where the other 3.5 gallons had gone. There was a small puddle under the freezer, which was directly below the “impact zone at the sink counter, but there had to be more. Just then, the forced-air furnace came on from a signal given to it by the thermostat upstairs, where a February night was sipping btu’s away.
Suddenly James yelled, “WHAT’S ALL THIS SMOKE?!?”
The next thing I heard was a house-wide cacophony of smoke alarms, a shrill note drilling holes in my eardrums. I looked at the furnace, a huge puddle still forming around its base, and my eye followed with disbelief, the path of a forced air supply duct to it’s floor boot, right under the counter where James had smacked the carboy and dumped most of our beer directly into the furnace. There a gas-fired flame incinerated the pumpkin ale into our indoor atmosphere, at night, in the middle of Winter.
I hit the shutoff switch and the furnace died. The smoke coming from my ears was masked by the thick cloud that smelled like burned pumpkin pie, as I went upstairs to survey the cleanup job. I had always dreaded this accident, every time I lifted the carboy of beer to the counter myself. With age comes experience, and a certain understanding of potential catastrophies. I always thought I’d be kicking myself for this accident, but it was brought to me by my young, enthusiastic nephew. He was bound to be feeling awful, and for quite awhile. The smoke was gone from my ears by the time I reached the main floor, but it was far from dissipated in the house.
James had the front door open, I opened the back, and went to the second floor to open a couple of windows. While I was up there, I went to each smoke alarm, opened the cover and disconnected the battery backup, then went to the basement to shut off the smoke alarm circuit. I went to the thermostat and set it to “fan”, then turned the system back on to run the forced air system, just to use the filter, not the fire.
When I met back up with James in the kitchen, all I could say was, “I’m glad Jan is out of town. This is gonna take a few days to clean up.”
“I’m SO SORRY.” James said. He meant it.
“I always thought I’d be the one to make that mistake,” I said, “Welcome to the homebrewers impasse.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s when you mess up, usually by mistakenly contaminating a batch of beer and having to throw it all out, or having your bottles explode, or in your case, having a spectacular accident with a full carboy. You either quit brewing and never look back, or you learn from your mistakes, pick up the pieces and try again.”
“I think I’m gonna quit.” He admitted.
“We’ll see.” I said.
* * * * * *
At my urging, James came directly home after working the ski lifts the next day, no bar-hopping with his pals, ready to clean the furnace inside and out. I had come home earlier, to take the side of the furnace off, exposing the manifolds to be cleaned.
We found the beer. what hadn’t spread out over the concrete floor was contained in the squirrel-cage fan housing, close to a half-gallon. It was still wasted, of course, but I admit to smelling it with a sincere sense of disdain. In the end, we spent one very long evening disassembling and cleaning every beer-touched part of the furnace, re-assembling and running it full blast. It was a good feeling to know that it was all “back to normal” before the Lady of the House came home, a week later. Or so I thought.
Of course I told her the whole story over the phone, soon after it happened. Jan was very glad it had happened while she was away. The first evening after she arrived home, I came in after work to see her standing in the kitchen with all the lower cabinet doors and drawers open, lots of bowls, pots and baking dishes out on the floor, most of them with dry, brown stains inside. “Looks like I’ve found more of your beer.” Jan said.
James and I knew that a fair share of the pumpkin ale had gone into the silverware drawer, seeing that it was right under the impacted edge of the counter, and we had gone in there the next evening, to get a couple of forks and knives to eat the boiled kielbasa sausage I’d cooked for dinner, before cleaning the furnace. The silverware had been nearly submerged in beer. We’d cleaned that up, and the two drawers below it, but we hadn’t looked next door, where most of our serious cooking implements are kept.
Jan was in New York, and we were following my “bachelor program”, wherein I do one massive cooking evening on Sunday, for the whole week ahead, so dinner preparation and cleanup are minimized on work nights. There had been no reason to go into that cabinet, or the one on the other side of the silverware drawer, for any cooking dishes, since before the beer accident.
After our two huge evenings of cleanup following the accident, James and I didn’t think to continue the investigation, to find every last place a drop of the accident had settled and dried.
After all that work, we were quite content to relax, quit worrying, and have a homebrew.