Geyser of Diet Coke

I had seen a demonstration of the Mentos-Diet Coke geyser in Internet videos, and I thought it would be a fun thing to do with my boys. So, during out latest trip to Target, I picked up a couple two-liter Diet Cokes and a package of Mentos. Apparently, the experiment is common enough that Mentos has it mentioned on their packages, and a loading tube even comes in the pack.

If you haven’t heard about this thing, here’s what it is:

Open a two-liter bottle of diet soda. Load a tube (like the one that comes in the Mentos package) full of about a dozen Mentos mints. Drop the mints into the cola as one dump, then quickly step back. The cola fizzes up so fast that it all shoots out the top of the bottle in a geyser of soda.

According to the videos, the spray can reach ten to twenty feet high. When we did it in our back yard, the geyser reached probably eight to ten feet. It’s a fun little trick, though very messy.

When I cleaned up the mess, I noticed the bottle caps had My Coke Rewards codes, so I kept them. Later in the evening, I went to the Coke Web site. To enter the codes and see if you won anything, you have to register an account, giving your name, address, email, telephone, everything. Well, I’m not about to give them all that info just so I can check to see if I’ve won 10 points towards something that costs 10,000 points. We don’t drink Coke products, anyway, so screw giving them a toe-hold on marketing to me.

But the Mentos-Coke geyser thing was cool.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com