Beer Bottle

13 Dec 2005

As I mentioned in Solarflare, some friends and I ended up camping out in the country after a hard-days driving. In the pitch-black of the evening we sat around the fire, drank some beer, talked shit, talked about shit, drank some more beer, and generally had a good time.

After we'd thrown all the burnables into the fire, I remembered one time when I'd actually gotten the fireplace in my folks house hot enough to melt glass*, so I threw a beer bottle into the campfire and tried my luck. Course, the sudden heat was too much for it and it cracked almost as soon as it hit the scorching coals.

So then I nudged another bottle in slowly, getting it warm on the perimeter, then pushing it closer till it was nice and hot, before edging it into the heart of the fire. A few more cracks and shattered attempts later, I had figured out the appropriate time-line and placement. - It was pretty impressive to see our little (well, big actually!) campfire fold a bottle over like it was plastic. Here you can see one of my successes deep in the heart of the fire, draped over the embers. And the remains of some broken failures in the foreground.

Getting the bottles in there and melted was easy enough, getting them out and letting them cool down slowly was the hard part. I lost quite a few more in removal (good thing there were many of us and many empty bottles of beer!) Come the end of the night, and still no melted bottle successfully pulled out, I decided to place a last few into the fire, leave them there over-night, and hoped that as the fire slowly died, that the bottles would cool down slowly enough to survive intact, allowing me to conveniently collect them the next morning.

Unfortunately, the following morning, one of the M's who'd gotten up early decided he'd tidy up the big spread of ash and coals by kicking it all into a pile. I walked up to hear the delicate sound of fragile glass clinking and tinkling. "Yeah, there were a lot of beer bottles in there A, but they're all broken now." - Thanks M!

*No word of a lie. When I was in my early teens I nicked/borrowed (with the teachers dubious permission) some glass tubing from the school science lab. Then one afternoon when my folks had gone out on the weekly grocery shop, I sat in front of the fire and stoked it for an hour or more... to the point that my face felt sunburnt. Then I stuck the glass tubing in, twirled it till the end was molten before pulling it and huffing and puffing till I'd blown out a little bubble.

[edit 16/03/07 :: submitted to Photo Friday Heat]

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