The Second Bottle of Mead

After seeing this in our beer closet earlier this week, we were quite cautious with handling our last two bottles of mead.


The ideal gas law states that the pressure of a gas in a fixed volume is proportional to the temperature of that gas; not wanting to experience any more explosions (they are great to write about but not so much fun to clean up), we carefully lowered the temperature of our two remaining bottles of mead. The first step was to don the appropriate gear -- I had visions of a bottle exploding into Dale's face, so insisted that he wear full personal protective equipment, including leather gloves and his welding face shield. If we owned body armor, Dale would have been wearing that as well. We don't, so I settled on a thick jacket.


Having at our disposal a couple of acre-feet of solidified water, Dale filled a cooler with snow and prepared to transfer the bottles.


I documented the mead transfer for life insurance purposes while Dale very carefully transferred both bottles of mead into the snow-filled cooler.


He carefully packed the bottles in the snow and we let the cooler sit in the garage.


Six hours later, Dale decided to open the first bottle. Not convinced that the sink would hold the explosion fizz-over (or at least, convinced that it would be difficult to clean the sink after the mead exploded over it), Dale decided to open the first bottle over the dog bath in the garage. I somehow forgot to enforce the personal protective equipment policy and Dale opened the bottle wearing only his leather gloves and jacket. He did, however, point the neck of the bottle away from his face (and away from mine!).


He carefully opened the bottle ... and nothing happened.


Sure, there were a few small bubbles rising to the top of the bottle, but no fizzing and certainly no explosion! It was one of the most anticlimactic moments I've experienced in a long time. In fact, I was almost sad that it didn't explode at least a little!

Dale poured two glasses and we enjoyed our very slightly fizzy mead, wondering as we drank it how one bottle became so highly pressurized that it exploded with such force that it launched itself off a shelf and embedded itself in the ceiling, while another bottle was so slightly pressurized that it barely fizzed when we opened it. Lowering the temperature should help, but lowering the temperature from 75F to freezing should have resulted in only about a 10% reduction in the pressure, which shouldn't have accounted for the vast difference we saw. This may be one of life's mysteries that we'll never fully understand!



By the way, we opened the third (and final) bottle the next day; like the second bottle, it barely fizzed.