bootlegging, take 1

the following is, of course, fiction. a thought experiment that explores a (naieve) method for obtaining non-alcoholic beer, the making of which i was challenged this weekend to perfect. my mother's cousin's wife pointed out that there's a huge market "out there" for a drinkable NA beer, and though my motivation is not swayed by market forces, it is an interesting challenge, and if i can pull it off in a month, before she goes back to drinking the good stuff, i'll have a whopping two consumers of my NA brew, maybe three, if i like the stuff.

so with all this in mind, i performed the following thought experiment last night: i located a bottle of emperor norton's, which had gone to visit the abovementioned mother's cousin's wife's house the night before and had spent a day lounging in a defrosted cooler. i mentally visualized putting the bottle into my freezer, then visualized myself going asleep. that done, i went to sleep.

this morning, i mentally visualized myself getting up, and when i had a clear picture of that, i did it, and visited the kitchen, where i mentally visualized the freezer, which turned out to be a waste of my mental capacity, since the freezer required no mental visualization, being, in fact, an actual, physical present appliance in my kitchen. i stopped wasting time mentally visualizing physically present objects and resumed my imaginings of what would have happened had i actually frozen a bottle of beer over night instead of just visualizing the act.

i opened the freezer and to my horror and surprise realized that i was mentally visualizing a bottle of beer with a swollen cap and a giant, globby cloud of bubbly beer foam mentally visualizing itself down the side of the bottle. it closely resembled a mental visualization of a slow motion explosion or clouds of fog billowing forth from a mentally visualized cold front.

i imagined what would happen if i were to take the hypothetical bottle of foaming, leaking, possibly distilled beer from the freezer and remove the cap. in my mind's eye, i saw: nothing much at all. the bubbly mess emanating from the imaginary bottle would most likely feel like slushy foam, and the icy barrier that had formed as the supposed frozen carbonated visualized beverage expanded its way up the hypothetical neck of the bottle sealed off the greater contents of the beverage container.

i strained my mind's eye and mentally visualized myself running warm water over the bottle, causing it to foam immensely and reconstitute the beer, or at least recombobulate it back to a very much alcoholic state, at which point i realized that really, freezing bottles, hypothetically, was not the method i was looking for to produce a flavorful non-alcoholic beer.

and it's a good thing i played that all out in my head instead of actually trying it, since, as my mental visualization revealed, actually trying it would result in little more than a messy failure.

chalk one up for thought experimentation.