A Potential Crisis Averted

There is nothing more comfortable that the interior of my car. It’s easy to keep clean because it’s a smaller space that doesn’t take a lot to clean and I’m not in it a lot and the only thing that I do in it is sit. Over the last couple years I have been able to keep it relatively clean but then I made a potentially horrible mistake. Typically I think ahead when transporting anything that could possibly spill anywhere. And then, on a whim I decided to purchase a growler from a local brewery that makes delicious beer.

Once upon a time I brought a growler from the other side of the country home in my luggage with no problems. That experience no doubt left me unjustly overconfident. I had been thinking of bringing home a growler recently and really should have brought the container that I got from that brewery in Baltimore. It has a ceramic top with a rubber stopper that clamps at the top forming a spill proof seal. But no, I forgot it and received a growler from the brewery with a typical screw top.

I should have known when the server started to wrap the top with roughly a quarter roll of electrical tape. I put it down in the seat of my car and just before I pulled out of the parking lot noticed out of the top of the growler a small trickle of beer starting to exit. Just before that sweet sweet stout could foul the perforations of my Japanese engineered leather passenger seat I grabbed the apparently porous container and placed it on top of my rubber floor mat in the passenger foot well. As the container jostled back and forth the electrical tape failed and what appeared to be a small amount of beer started to drip out. I gingerly took corners and made it the short distance home without making any adjustments.

I figured that the rubber floor mat would catch everything but should have known better as I had to trim it to fit the generic mat into my car. At three points brown puddles of distilled grain had started to seep into my previously virgin carpet. Instead of crying I rushed inside and obtained a roll of paper towels, carpet cleaner and a shop vac. Half an hour of furious clean up later everything looked okay, but it was dark so I couldn’t be sure. A few days later and my car doesn’t smell like beer and the carpet looks alright. I was lucky this time. There’s just nothing worse than something that makes one’s car a little less pristine. I wish I could drape every surface of it with plastic…