Glass Handgrenade with the Pin Pulled

Three bottles of cider exploded in the basement sometime in the last two weeks. Didn't hear 'em, but had a bad feeling about 'em.

The Oak Glen Cider was pretty sweet, and we goosed it as it went down to assure a fizzy end result. The last two bottles we opened ever so carefully shot 4 feet in the air, and all but about 250 ml was lost!

It was good stuff though; and oh what a wallop!

Still, especially with the recent spate of warm weather, I should have been expecting the problem and opened and re-bottled all of them.

When I went down to the basement to put away some empties, I noticed we only had one bottle standing.

Yikes!

Since that one bottle was essentially a glass grenade with the pin pulled, I lifted the remaining bottle out of the shards and carried it, ever so slowly, in gloved hands, wearing eye protection, out into the backyard. I set it carefully on the table, and gingerly popped the cap. As I am getting better at catching air borne cider, I got nearly 300 ml of the 600 or so in the bottle.

It made a lovely meter-tall spout of out of the bottle, though.

Meanwhile, the TJ cider is cloudy, skunky, and low on alcohol too; nice fizz though. So we will give all that cider another six weeks or more before we open another tester.

'Course, this happened last time, now that I think of it. The bottling was so undrinkable at the early test that we got discouraged and let it age another two or three months -- at which point it had clarified and was quiet yummy. Stand by on this one!