As it turns out, the people living in faraway Beijing, China, and I share a profound fear of exploding beer bottles. Suddenly, the world seems much smaller. According to Reuters, "Beer bottles that exploded in the hot summer weather were one of the biggest health risks Chinese consumers faced last year." The China Consumers’ Association complaint and law department received 1,621 complaints about food safety in 2003 and most of the personal injuries were caused by beer bottle explosions. The unwritten message between the lines is that drinking can be dangerous, even before the bottle is opened. What their mothers told them as children still holds true for adult beer drinkers — "Be careful or you will poke your eye out." My personal fear of exploding beer bottles dates back to the early ‘50s, when my father took up a new hobby, brewing beer. His one-consumer brewing and bottling operation was set up in the basement fruit cellar, directly beneath the kitchen. The five children in our family were encouraged to watch what was going on but we couldn’t touch the equipment. It was tempting to run hands over the shiny kettles and the brand-new bottle-capping device in the room, which had been proudly lined from floor to ceiling with jars of my mother’s pickled peaches, stewed tomatoes, bread and butter pickles and corn relish. Even the brown paper grocery store bags, filled with shiny, long-necked brown beer bottles were attractive to us. Our father had consumed diligently to save enough bottles for his new hobby. For a short time, odors of something that smelled like bad bread mold or sweaty, old gym socks drifted up the basement stairs and to the rest of the house. If we complained, we were reminded by our father with his Calvinist upbringing, "Some things must be suffered before they can be enjoyed." The long-awaited bottling activities began early on a Saturday morning. Our father became a one-man assembly line and, by the time the sun was setting, what seemed like hundreds of newly capped bottles of beer stood at attention on the concrete cellar floor. There seemed to be entire regiments of bottles, perfectly lined up from all directions, and they covered most of the floor. Before he flicked off the ceiling light and shut the cellar door, my father gave a final benediction, "Now it will have to settle. It will be good." With his work behind him, he planned to rest the seventh day. We were all eating around the chrome-legged kitchen table on Sunday evening when the disturbance broke loose beneath us. At first it sounded like a single gun shot and then the shots quickly escalated into a deafening, all-out war. Sharp pings vibrated the floor beneath our feet and the noisy racket and unmistakable sounds of shattering glass seemed endless. As suddenly as they had started, the shots ceased. "Don’t move, anyone!" admonished my father. "I’ll go down there alone." When he returned to the kitchen, his face was pale and his eyes still registered shock and disbelief. The aftermath of war is never pleasant. As the oldest child, I was instantly promoted to the after-dinner cleanup detail. The slowly opened cellar door revealed wall-to-wall shards and splinters of brown glass, barely visible beneath a tidal wave of beer foam. Like small fountains, a few newly punctured jars of peaches and stewed tomatoes spewed their contents onto the floor. As for the beer bottles — there were no survivors.
