For Father’s Day this year, I gave Brian a home-brew IPA beer kit along with a set of bottles, caps and a capper. He really liked the idea and soon set about making his first galloon of brew. It looked like a cool process…I watched it intermittently as I walked past the kitchen one Saturday afternoon. The first part of the process smelled…yummy…sort of like oatmeal. Anyway, fast forward past the 2 weeks it sat in the basement and past the 2 weeks it sat in bottles in the pantry to last Thursday. That morning, I went to the pantry to grab something for breakfast. The first thing I noticed was a bunch of small black things everywhere on the floor…upon closer inspection, I realized that the entire floor was covered in a sticky substance. I examined all the shelves and realized that one of Brian’s beer bottles had literally exploded. The base of the bottle still sat on the shelf with it’s beer bottle brothers, but the rest was…everywhere! It must have happened during the night because all the beer was dry…and, it was acting as a glue for the thousands of pieces of glass that were on the floor, the shelves, on boxes and on the walls of the pantry. Later, Brian told me that he got a low yield from the first batch and that the sugar content in each bottle was probably much higher than it should normally be. I can attest to that…all the shards were STUCK! I spent most of the day emptying the pantry, cleaning each thing as it came out and putting the whole thing back together. The good news is that my WAY-overdue-for-a-cleaning pantry now looks sparkly clean. Here is the label I’m planning to make for Brian’s first batch of beer:

Get it? Like “clean up on Aisle 5” over the loudspeaker at the grocery store?? We thought it was funny anyway ;)

Brian tests one of the surviving beers…not bad…a little sweet ;)