How long until my bottles turn into bombs?

I just bottled last night and I backsweetened the cider from 1.000 to 1.020 with frozen apple and cranberry juice concentrate. The yeast I used initially was a T-58. I am going to open a bottle 24 hours from when I bottled it to check the carb level. Is that too soon? Any one have results from 1.020 for how long I should let it carb before I pasteurize?

Ive never used t58 but if its a pretty strong fermentor Id start checking around day 3 if its at room temperature. Day one isnt going to be a whole lot different from bottling day.
A good idea for checking carb levels is to bottle one into a soda/water bottle (something close to your bottling size) and when it reaches the firmness of a unopened soda you know its hitting a carb level close to soda. Its a pretty convenient method and it'll give you a reference point to compare to so you can get less/more carbonation to your taste.

Water bottles won't work. It has to be a bottle constructed to hold carbonation...


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

A plastic water bottle will work, plenty of others and myself use them and they work just fine. Im curious why you think they wouldn't?

Bearclaw215 said:

A plastic water bottle will work, plenty of others and myself use them and they work just fine. Im curious why you think they wouldn't?

Click to expand...

Because most water bottles are thinner plastic than soda bottles, and aren't designed to hold pressure. They may hold some pressure, but they may not.

Plastic PET bottles work great, though!

I don't see why anyone would want to bottle their beer in plastic containers, I know they come with Mr. Beer kits, but bottles themselves are so easy to come by......Just me I guess.......

dstranger99 said:

I don't see why anyone would want to bottle their beer in plastic containers, I know they come with Mr. Beer kits, but bottles themselves are so easy to come by......Just me I guess.......

Click to expand...

He's saying to just use ONE water bottle so you can gauge the carb level in the bottles.

My personal experience was aprox 48 hours from bottling to pasteurization. However, I relied on a 16 ounce plastic coke bottle to give me some indication.

dstranger99, the reason I bottle some in plastic, is due to the "no glass bottles" in the parks or on the beaches around where I live. I have the piece of mind I won't have to watch for broken glass when barefoot.

MindenMan said:

dstranger99, the reason I bottle some in plastic, is due to the "no glass bottles" in the parks or on the beaches around where I live. I have the piece of mind I won't have to watch for broken glass when barefoot.

Click to expand...

Ah! Well nothing wrong with that.

If anyones interested in the numbers, we tested this in lab last year.
Max psi = bottle failure of some kind. It was never the cap unless we compromised it in some way, like heat treating it. These are all averaged numbers of perfect bottles, so some went higher/lower. We never did glass because of the danger involved but i want to say the professor said it was higher than the plastic, i just can't remember for sure.

new thin walled 16.9 oz water bottle - max psi ~175 psi
thick walled bottled water bottle - max psi ~190
16 oz soda bottle - Coke max psi ~190 psi. Pepsi max psi ~195. Im not sure if pepsi is actually stronger or if we got lucky with ours but thats how it averaged out.
2L bottles - ~165 psi

We did a few others but i dont want to put them all up to show how way over engineered they all and how strong this stuff really is. Also the strength of the bottle goes down if there are imperfections like creases from squeezing . On a cool note all these bottles go well above 200 psi with a little tape reinforcing.