beergears

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I just read about this tip for people starting out:

At bottling time, bottle a single PET soda bottle as a test piece, so, later on you can squeeze-test it to check your in-bottle fermentation -and possibly get an early warming of bottle bomb..??

Seems to make sense to my untrained brewing brain.

Anybody ever done that?

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david_42

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Even though I keg & force carbonate, if the style requires higher carbonation, I'll put some in a PET bottle and add some sugar so it will carbonate.

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deharris

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You may already know this, but since this is in the beginners forum: I did a thread on bottle bombs (one of many on the site, I'm sure) and the consensus was that bottle bombs are rare and usually the result of stuck fermentation, overpriming, or (more rarely) infection. If you take hydrometer readings and use the 3/4 c priming sugar per 5 gal. batch rule, it is very unlikely your bottles will explode.

Yooper

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Sometimes I do that, most often not. I used to do it more often when I had less beer piled up. When I didn't have a homebrew stash, I was very eager to check the carbonation and drink a few as soon as possible. Now, I have a little bit of a stash so I can wait a couple of weeks or so. It's a good idea for people who are eager to sample their beer and want a visible way to check carbonation.

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malkore

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You pretty much have to TRY to get a bottle bomb.

meaning, you have to throw sound advice into the wind and bottle way to early without using a hydrometer.
Or grossly over use priming sugar.

because other than the above, an infection that can exceed your yeast's attenuation, that's the only way you'd get a bomb. and infections are generally rare unless you're not sanitizing well or you're unlucky enough to get a 'bug' in your brewery.

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Malkore
Primary: English Mild
On tap: Pale Ale, Lancelot's Wheat, English Brown Ale, Steam Beer, HoovNuts IPA
Bottled: MOAM, Braggot, Raspberry Melomel, Merlot, Apfelwein, Pyment, Sweet mead, Cabernet
Gal in 2009: 27, Gal in 2010: 34, Gal in 2011: 13, Gal in 2012: 10

IowaStateFan

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Not long ago I would have been making that post. However, I recently learned that bottle bombs happen

Mine was the result of a stuck fermentation. When I bottled the s.g. was a little higher than I expected, but not way out of wack - something like 1.018 vs. expected of 1.012. It had been in the secondary for a month so I figured it was okay to bottle.