mythbusters test beer

[Corp000085]

a couple of weeks ago, we had a discussion about cooling beer. we pretty much figured that cooling beer in salt water/ice was the best method. Tonight, they tested beer cooled in a fridge, freezer, ice, ice with water, ice with water and salt. The results are beer in salt water cooled in 5 minutes, ice water 15, and the rest were much higher. Interestingly though, spraying a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher on a beer cools it the quickest, roughly 2 minutes... Anyways, i'll edit that link in once i'm done searching if someone doesn't beat me to it.

 

now they're making beer cooling contraptions. pretty interesting.

 

by the way, the redhead vegetarian chick (kari??) is really cute to me... in a girl next door kinda way. i'm not partial to the tattoo chick.

 

 

 

edit: it was AD who brought it up

 

http://www.stadiumwall.com/index.php?showtopic=20494&st=0

[NavyBillsFan]

Discovery Channel is just outstanding man. Put it on at 7 and you can leave it on all night long.

 

I love American Choppers, watching those two go at it is funny....

 

I wish Iron Chef was on that channel!

[Phil Hansen Forever]

On the flip side, if you ever wonder which is the fastest method to get the charcoal hot, Purdue University Enginers figured it out for you:

 

LIGHTING CHARCOAL GRILLS

or WHY ENGINEERS ARE THE WAY THEY ARE...

Our subject today is lighting charcoal grills. One of our favorite charcoal grill lighters is a guy named George Goble (really!!), a computer person in the Purdue University engineering department. Each year, Goble and a bunch of other engineers hold a picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at which they cook hamburgers on a big grill. Being engineers, they began looking for practical ways to speed up the charcoal-lighting process. "We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told me in a telephone interview. "Then we figured out that it would light faster if we used a vacuum cleaner."

If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general, you know what happened: The purpose of the charcoal-lighting shifted from cooking hamburgers to seeing how fast they could light the charcoal. From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch, then an acetylene torch. Then Goble started using compressed pure oxygen, which caused the charcoal to burn much faster, because as you recall from chemistry class, fire is essentially the rapid combination of oxygen with a reducing agent (the charcoal). We discovered that a long time ago, somewhere in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (or something along those lines). By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times. But in the world of competitive charcoal lighting, "pretty good" does not cut the mustard.

 

Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using -- get ready -- liquid oxygen. This is the form of oxygen used in rocket engines; it's 295 degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as regular oxygen. In terms of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen on charcoal is the equivalent of throwing a live squirrel into a room containing 50 million Labrador retrievers.

 

On Gobel's Web page (the address is http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/), you can see actual photographs and a video of Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for ignition. What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball that according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in - this has to be a world record - 3 seconds. There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same technique on a flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill. All that's left is a circle of charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it. "Basically, the grill vaporized," said Goble. "We were thinking of returning it to the store for a refund."

 

Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers' picnic site. But also, I was proud of my country for producing guys who can be ready to barbecue in less time than it takes for guys in less-advanced nations, such as France, to spit. Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken? Will engineers come up with a new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology? It's something for all of us to ponder this summer as we sit outside, chewing our hamburgers, every now and then glancing in the direction of West Lafayette, Indiana, looking for a mushroom cloud.

 

Engineers are like that.

 

 

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[nodnarb]

i fuggin love mythbusters.