The DU Lounge

an odor. That was enough to make me nervous to go down there - but one summer really topped the charts

My dad was a huge beer drinker. One year he decided to make his own - somewhere in the mid to late '50s. We were in the Cold War with Russia and this year tensions were running high.

My dad bottled hundreds of bottles of homemade brew and stored them on shelves in the dark, cool basement. After a week or so we had a real hot spell - hotter than hell. Even the basement got hot.

So hot that a bottle of beer exploded around midnight, then another and another. Pretty soon it sounded like WW3 had started in our basement. We all got up and ran down to the basement. He had bottled 2 gross. Few survived. For about 15 minutes we thought we were under attack.