I first found out about the possibility of homebrewing beer sometime around 1999. I was attending college at Mississippi State University at the time and like most students I was broke. However, one evening I decided to buy a copy of Brew Your Own magazine at the local bookstore.
I read through that single magazine time and time again. I gazed in awe at the foreign looking pictures of equipment and read articles over and over that I didn't quite understand. One day I finally decided that brewing my own beer was something that I was determined to do.
One of the ads in the homebrewing magazine had caught my eye and I frequently visited the company's website. It wasn't quite as advanced as some of the more modern homebrew supply shops around today but there was a brewing kit that intrigued me. The kit was represented by a rotating gif image of a skull and had some kind of deathly connotation in the name. I read the description and decided that this was the beer for me. It promised to be extreme and high in alcohol and I'm sure it promised a lot more but that's really all I remember at the time I bought it.
Even though I had been reading everything I could find in those days about homebrewing, I still had only a limited knowledge of beer styles. Unfortunately this lack of knowledge had led me to selecting a beer kit that was an extract barleywine kit.
When the kit arrived at my house I looked over all of the strange looking ingredients: malt extract, hops, a bag of strange looking grains. Reading the directions, it sounded like a pretty simple process. The only thing required was to boil some water, add the strange looking yellow-tan powder, and throw in some green pellets (at pre-determined times of course). What intrigued me the most in the instructions was a small additional instruction. If you want to increase the alcohol of this beer add up to one pound of light brown sugar.
Well....the only problem with that was that I assumed if 1 pound made it better, then 5 pounds would make it a lot better. So, I added 5 pounds of brown sugar to a beer with an OG of somewhere around 1.100. If you're already a homebrewer, or if you know anything about sugar content and original gravity, then you can see where this is going.
I was so proud of my first brew session that I was glowing with confidence and pride. i finished everything up by sprinkling the small packet of yeast on top of my freshly brewed wort and sealing the lid on the bucket. I affixed the airlock in the bucket, moved it to the corner of my bedroom and waited. When my wife came home I explained my accomplishment to her. She was polite enough to act impressed by my accomplishment of boiling water. However she also made it pretty clear that I better not leave some kind of mess in our house.
The first few days of fermentation were pretty uneventful and the airlock was showing some sign of activity, however, the most unusual thing was happening. The plastic lid on top of the bucket fermenter was beginning to bulge. I really didn't thing it was that big of a deal at the time but (as I've already mentioned) I didn't have a clue about what was going on underneath that bulging lid.
The day of the incident was a pretty normal day and my wife and I both had to leave the house for most of the day. When we arrived back home that evening I walked into the house to check on my precious fermenting nectar and found that the lid for the fermenter was in the floor and the wall and ceiling were covered in a strange smelling brown sludge.
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