I’ve seen beer do strange things to men and women, but nothing like what it did to our family cats.
Patch and Ribs (mother and son) were feline residents and part of our family, commanding full attention as to food requirements and hours of leisure. In fact, leading a perfect cat’s life.
I was in my learning mode for home-brewing a few years back and had obtained all the ingredients separately, mixing up a concoction from a recipe given to me by someone who knew someone who knew something about home-brewing. Or at least that was the story. This was in the days before home-brew shops and kits.
For this particular brew I decided to put half in 750ml bottles and half in 375ml stubbies. For some bizarre reason (I wonder if it had anything to do with beer) my teenage son begged to help me and after I recovered from the shock I put him in charge of adding the sugar prior to bottling and gave him precise instructions on how to do it.
Task completed, we put the bottles onto shelves in the external laundry for the secondary fermentation. Coincidentally, this was Patch and Ribs’ boudoir.
Two weeks after bottling the brew I went into the laundry to let the cats out for the day. An unusual sight confronted me. Two cats, oblivious to their surroundings, were walking at virtually half their normal height, scraping the ground, their eyes glazed, racing in forward motion with only their toes moving (the same as cartoon cats on the TV), desperate to escape as quickly as possible from their house of horrors.
Evidently through the night the 375ml stubbies, due to their thin glass walls, had been unable to hold the inner pressure and had exploded, causing a chain reaction, smashing about six bottles. Glass shards and beer was everywhere.
Imagine what it had been like for Patch and Ribs, settled in for the night when all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. It was Pearl Harbor in the laundry and they had no way of escaping and no idea about what was happening.
They were in shock — literally out of their minds with fear.
What caused the bottles to erupt?
My son had done what he thought was right and put the same amount of sugar into each bottle, causing a vigorous secondary fermentation in the smaller bottles. Who said teenagers don’t listen?
The poor cats were not keen to sleep in the laundry that night; in fact, they even discovered a hitherto unknown ability to run backwards in order to escape.
Soon after, Patch died after being run over by the family car, although it was thought this might have been suicide. Ribs died of kidney failure.
It seemed neither had the will to go on. Talk about having the horrors!