use 5 ounces for 5 gallons. that'll do ya. anything beyond is extra. beyond makes it foam over when opened, or blow up. if you want to increase the abv, do it before bottling. yes, after bottling it would increase abv, and that is what causes BOOM
No no no....that's not true. And bad information to boot.
Many Styles are carbed higher than the standard 4.5- 5 ounces of sugar/2.-2.5 volumes of co2 that comes with basic kits, and often that is more sugar than that. Think of belgian beers for instance, or some pilsners, or Autralian sparkling ales. They are all carbed higher than most basic beers, and except for beligians are often bottled in normal bottles and they don't gush or explode.
You can just look at beersmith and see the different amounts of sugar needed to carb by style.
For example the style volume of co2 range for an Australian Ale is 2-
2.8 volumes of Co2, and if the beer is @ 70 degrees at bottling time, then you would need,
6.12 ounces of sugar if you wanted to carb at the highest volume for that style.
and the beer would surely not gush or go boom if that were the case.
Putting extra sugar in is NOT going to automaticlly make your beer gush, or the bottle go boom....
That 4.5 - 5 ounces really just tends to be the baseline for most gravity/ styles of beer, (when bottled at 70 degrees) but there are plenty of styles that use less or more sugar to be less or more carbed than that.
Here's the volumes of co2 for most beer styles...you can see how high Belgians and German weizens can be carbed.
Style & Volumes of CO2
American ales 2.2–3.0
British ales 1.5–2.2
German weizens 2.8–5.1
Belgian ales 2.0–4.5
European Lagers 2.4–2.6
American Lagers 2.5–2.8
This from BYO should give you an idea;
Three-Quarters of a Cup?
You may be wondering — do I need to bother with all of this? Can’t I just keep adding 0.75 cups of corn sugar? The answer, of course, is up to you, but here are some facts.
Three quarters of a cup of corn sugar (glucose monohydrate), which weighs around 4.5 oz. (128 g), added to an ale fermented at 70 °F (21 °C) would yield about 2.5 volumes of CO2. However, if you add the same amount to a beer that was fermented and primed at 50 °F (10 °C), you get about 2.9 volumes of CO2. Using the equations
And I can't recall, its been a number of years, but a basic 12 ounce beer bottle, or as it is called the
Longneck Industry Standard Bottle (ISB) can actually hold around 4 volumes of co2 without breaking. I can't find the numbers, but it IS greater than the normal 2-2.5 volumes of co2, it may even be 5 volumes.
for safety reasons it would have to be much greater than the normal volume of co2 a beer is primed at. They are going to vary obviously in wall thickness. But NORMALLY they won't burst, unless as mentioned repeatedly you waaaay over prime, waaaay over heat, or have an infection.
What happens in a bottle infection is that the wild yeast usually can eat more of the nonfermentable sugars than normal yeast can, so they begin eating away at the beer (making it thin and cidery often)
and most importanly begin generating more and more co2, until it exceed the capacity of the bottle (which is quite high) until it either finds a flaw in the bottle or the bottle can simply no longer contain the cos THEN boom.
But not under normal circumstances.....
And as to the idea that the ABV of the beer rises significantly because of bottle priming, I don't consider .005% to be considerable do you? That's about how much the abv increases with the miniscule amound of 5 ounces of sugar you add to the 5 gallon batch or beer.