You put the Mentos in the Diet Coke...

and shake it all around. You've seen all the "instructional videos" about the new summer pastime to create rockets using Mentos and Diet Coke. We talked about this in the lunchroom on Wednesday, and decided to try it out on Thursday afternoon at work.

Starring in our experiment is co-worker Doug, left, playing with the mentos, head of the office Steve, the "helper" in the middle, and co-worker Rob at right surveying the landscape.


We had 7 bottles of Diet Coke in total, so lots of opportunities to try out the experiment. The first time, Doug learned once you put the Mentos in the bottle, it blows up v. quickly. I learned I was videoing portrait instead of landscape.

By the 5th attempt, Doug got down the process of getting the Mentos in the bottle and getting the cap on realquick and then doing lots of shaking (including some dancing/shaking). My thought is the more shaking, the better the rocket launches. We also decided throwing the bottle against a rock in the rocky dirt pile behind our building was a good idea. You can see we didn't quite have the hang of it.

Finally though, we got our rocket in the air. From the sound of it, you can tell it was VERY exciting.