Fun with Carbonated Beverages

Today is the day after Christmas and I got to spend some quality time with my parents. We spent the afternoon at a brewery tour at Budweiser in Merrimack, NH where my uncle works. After the tour, we got a few free tastes and went to see the team of Clydesdale horses. Here's a pic of us in front of the stables. (Now imagine how pretty this picture could be if there were actually any snow on the ground.)


After the tour, we went out for lunch/dinner and then came home to make mentos/diet coke bombs. We were watching Mythbusters yesterday and the guys on the show were seeing how high they could get the coke to spray up when they dropped mentos candy into the bottles. There's this video online showing a ton of crazy timed and coordinated soda fountains. Of course, we weren't interested in aesthetics. We were about making a sticky mess.

Here's my dad drilling a hole in the bottle cap so we could build up max pressure.


Here's one of me and my dad getting ready to drop the mentos.


This is the soda spraying into the air. We really didn't get any good pictures of this. Aside from it being dark, we were trying to avoid getting soaked, so picture taking was tough.


This one might be my favorite. This is my mom demonstrating what happens when you take a huge gulp of diet coke, and then pop a mentos into your mouth. The best part was the 3 or 4 minutes after this when she was burping uncontrollably from all the carbonation.