sweasel.com

Hey, that’s a photo from MY model train set! Are you peeking through my windows again Jim Comey!

I had not heard about the great beer flood, but I have heard about the Great Molasses Flood in Boston.

National Beer Day? “Day” is singular?

Every day is Beer Day!

Well, every day that isn’t already rye whiskey day or plonk day is beer day.

@ Skandia Recluse
How droll! You could have at least typed “Boston says… ‘Hold my beer’!” 21 dead, 150 injured and I’m not kidding! (January 15, 1919)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
~
Regale yourself with these other “flood disasters” and pay attention to the image which declares
Darwin’s Natural Selection
5% Alcohol ~ 500ml

http://www.momtastic.com/webecoist/2010/10/12/wave-goodbye-10-of-the-worlds-worst-toxic-floods/

Children drown. 🙁

And then there is the great Cheese and Butter Fire in Madison Wisconsin, ably hymned by Lou and Peter Berryman in their ballad “Pflaum Road.” (Sadly, there is no youtube).

@ Cantharkmycry:
YT must have just added it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWKyi_DdiaA

Yes, the Molasses Flood was legendary, when I worked near Boston.

Also, there was a bourbon fire in Tennessee once. The bourbon flooded the crick and the crick burned. I forget the details.

So, I really appreciate all you beer drinkers who did not, in fact, shout at me that THE TAP IS ON THE SIDE, YOU MORON — THE THING ON THE TOP IS A RELIEF VALVE.

I am grateful for your tact.

@ ExpressoBold
Thank you! Haven’t listened to that one in a while … not, perhaps, one of their better efforts. But it sticks in my mind because of the fire, which I’d never heard of before.
Fascinating topic, food disasters … hope folks keep ’em coming

@Cantharkmycry – Don’t forget all those unfortunate people who fell into the food coloring vat and dyed.

@ Uncle Al
Eyeroll!

Or the lens grinder who fell into his machinery and made a spectacle of himself.

You’re quite welcome for the tact – hope you (and – maybe – Uncle Badger) enjoy the beer…

@ Uncle Al – We Shall Remember – OTOH, maybe those folks can be re-born as Easter Eggs…

RE: The Great Boston Molasses Flood – I heard that the commonest joke at the time was to ask: “So – howcum you yelled “Fire!”, when the tank went bust?” – to which the answer was, of course: “Well, now, and who would come if we was to yell “Molasses!”, I ask yez?”…

That one works well enough – suitably-altered, of course – for The Great Beer Flood, etc…

OT, but here’s how you catch a badger:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA8pxzawUGM

Courtesy of ace.mu.nu Saturday Overnight Open Thread (6/16/18)

Can’t get the beer out of the mini keg? Are we talking a 5 liter job, the kind with the rubber stopper on top that has a plastic bung in it? And sometimes a pouring tap on the lower side? Push the bung in – it’s actually made for a little tap to be pressed in, but most of them these days just have the tap valve on the side. But you have to open the bung to get the air in. If it doesn’t have a side tap, and you don’t have the proper kind of mini keg tap, which has a long hard thin plastic cylinder that you press in to the keg, press the bung in anyway, then get a hand tool, pliers work, and tear the rubber stopper out. Good snips can cut it in half first, which makes it easy to remove. Then all you have to do is slosh it into a big mug, or figure out how to make a siphon.

Sadly, by now the beer is probably warm and flat. Which is exactly how the English like it IIRC !! So fret not. There is a fix.

Alas, if it isn’t a 5L keg, I can’t help you.

I’d call up who ever sold it to you and ask them how to open it. You’re not the first nor the last who screwed it up.

323,000 imperial gallons… in one vat???

1 IG = 4.55 liters. 3.23 x 10e5 x 4.55 = 1.47 x 10e6 liters = 1.47 x 10e3 cubic meters.

How big would the vat have to be? 5 meters deep by 19.4 meters across. It would weigh over 1,500 tons.

I can’t imagine any brewer in his right mind building such a thing. Think how long it would take to fill it (and at this time, all the pumping would be done by hand or animal power). Then there is the risk of a batch going bad. Who’d want to risk so much at a time? And how would one prepare and monitor such an enormous load? Stirring hops and yeast into it would be a heroic feat. And it would make production very jerky; one would want much smaller batches finishing daily or half-daily, not one enormous batch twice a month.

I call bull—-. Although the Great Beer Flood was a real event, it can’t have been from the failure of a single vat, or it wasn’t that big.