Life Imitates TV

Sometimes things happen that just seem better suited to television sitcoms.

Friday night, not long after I made that last post, the boiling stage of the brewing process ended. At that point you want to cool the wort (beer minus the yeast) as quickly as you can, for reasons I won't go into here. I have a contraption made of copper tubes that I immerse in the brewpot - cold water runs through it and helps speed the cooling process - think of it as a radiator, only in reverse.

The input tube has a hose connection so I ran it into my back yard to the hose bib. The output tube got crammed down the drain of the kitchen sink.

After the chiller had been running for five minutes or so I checked the hose connections to the copper tubing. The input hose slipped off in my hand and started shooting water around the kitchen and family room like a firehose. I managed to get it shoved down into the sink fairly quickly, but the pressure on the hose was high enough that it wasn't staying put - so I couldn't go outside to turn off the water.

I finally managed to reach a dishtowel, which I shoved into the drain to hold the hose. Whew. I got everything put back together and then got to spend 30 minutes trying to clean up the mess. The couch cushions dried pretty quickly and the coffee table isn't showing any real water damage...

There was a small upside to all this - as there was water all over the kitchen floor, I just scuffed around in my socks for a few minutes, eliminating any need to mop it.