i bottled a beer to bring to homebrew club meeting, in two weeks, in a growler. it’s a 64 oz. screw top growler.
i’ve never made a bottle bomb, so i hope this isn’t the first.
No reason it should be unless you overcarbonated it.
i used 3.6 oz of regular sugar per some website where i did it to the “robust porter” style. 5 gallons of beer, so i’m hoping i’m good.
Assuming you fermented the beer to terminal gravity…you should be in good shape with that amount of sugar for 5 gal of a Porter.
two weeks primary and a week in secondary. i didn’t check before bottling, but it was down to 1.021 (from 1.082) at the end of the second week. i feel certain it was down all the way.
That’s 74% AA. Which yeast strain did you use?
You’d have to really screw up to have a bottle bomb in two weeks anyway.
i used two packages of safale-s04…
sorry… i’ve been off the grid a bit… lasek… i can kind of see now. can’t wait until i’m 100%.
Just remember that low pressure in a large volume is more powerful than high pressure in a small volume. The growler can probably withstand normal carbonation and since it is only 2 quarts I wouldn’t worry.
Now a carboy… that would be shady. :o
I’m not sure what you mean by this euge. Pressure is not more or less powerful depending on the size of the vessel. I larger vessel may be structurally weaker, but that’s not the same thing. :-\
Actually that is not correct. Of course it seems counterintuitive because high pressure in a large volume is dangerous as well. I’m looking for the equation… maybe some of our engineer friends have it.
Are you talking about PV=nRT? I don’t see how that applies. Some other equation?
I think I have no idea what you mean by “more powerful”, because it’s obviously something different from what I mean.
Force exerted over the area would be better than “powerful”. Sorry. I’m dragging 30 year old knowledge out. Wish I had that equation handy. You would never have to build a big bottle thicker- such as a champagne bottle to contain the pressure, based on your assumption. A longneck can can easily hold the volumes a champagne bottle holds. Whereas if the champagne bottle had walls the thickness of the longneck it would be more likely to rupture from the pressure.
A growler is usually pretty hefty. I’d trust less than 3 volumes in mine.
It’s been a long time for me too, but not 30 years 
I see what you mean now, but you’re still a bit off the mark. I mean, you’re kind of right, but for the wrong reasons.
It is independent of the volume of the vessel, what matters is the radius of the cylinder. As the radius of the cylinder increases, the wall thickness will need to increase in order to withstand the same pressure because the glass is subject to higher stress. It is the shape that matters, not the size. A 12 oz bottle shaped like a whiskey flask will need thicker walls than a cylindrical 12 oz bottle. By the same token, a cylindrical 64 oz bottle with the same wall thickness and radius as a standard 12 oz bottle (and as tall as it needs to be) will hold the pressure just as well as the 12 oz bottle.
That’s not necessarily true, because the volume will increase as the radius increases. If it doesn’t, than the surface area of the top and bottom would be increasing to make up for the reduced wall height.
It’s pounds per square inch and that force isn’t just exerted on the sides. In the case of growlers, the top and bottom are thicker by design, so the walls are the weak point.
just an update… no explosion… i’m going to refrigerate it on sunday as it will have been in there three weeks and it’s three weeks before the next hbc meeting.
Ahhhh I can rest easy! 
About my assertion, which I learned in highschool Chem 2 and then was also taught about this later when I worked for Dowell Schlumberger in the 1980’s. In fact we spent an entire afternoon with VHS presentations. : We worked the equation, plugging variables, and even some of the engineers didn’t believe it at first.
We worked around high and low pressure equipment, pumps, storage tanks etc. The intent was to raise the awareness that a low pressure containment system can rupture easily and catastrophically, but more so that hatches can blow open when unlatched and crush people with even a small differential in hydrostatic pressure. Intent was that we not let our guard down just because some thing is of relatively low PSI, atmospheres, pascals etc…
I have great respect for anything under pressure, especially a keg full of beer.
years ago i filled up a sanitized growler with primed beer. It worked just fine.
the only problem was that the yeast and gunk at the bottom mixed into the beer when pouring.
If you could pour the whole thing in one step into a pitcher, you’d be better off.
It is necessarily true. That changing the radius also increases the volume in your example is secondary. Increasing the radius without increasing the volume would also require an increase in wall thickness. Picture an oval bottle - it must be thicker to hold the same pressure. Here is the equation:
σ = pr/t
where σ is stress, p is pressure, r is the radius, and t is the wall thickness. Since v (volume) does not appear in the equation, it is independent of the volume.
I think it is probably a common misconception, because it works in many cases and for most people it is a good enough explanation. If you are going to keep more or less the same shape and relative dimensions, it is certainly true. But the shape is really the thing that matters. My undergrad was in Mechanical Engineering - I remembered the concept, but had to go look for the equation. :) It’s a thin walled pressure vessel, there are a lot of websites that talk about it.
Glad it worked