I have followed this for a while, since the inventor and invention was adopted by a favorite local brewery, Strange. The question of growler pressures intrigued me. We have all heard "you cannot carbonate in a growler" and "never add priming sugar to try and carbonate in a growler" and so on.
How much of this is myth? Has anyone actually first of all, measured the pressures created when bottle carbonating using priming sugar? Second of all, has anyone really done any burst testing on growlers? This guy is the first I have read, yet there must be industry data out there. I have some growlers that are fairly thin, and others that have really thick, heavy glass.
During some of my long cycling trips, we used to take one liter soda bottles, make a hole in the cap, insert a used tire tube valve and pump them up to bursting, which would result in a very loud bang to of course disturb the other campers.
It seems to me that someone with some time and the right protection could take this idea of tire valves and a floor pump and some kind of protective box and test a variety of bottles and growlers and come up with some numbers.
Likewise, there must be some pressure gauge that keeps the high pressure and could be rigged to a bottle cap to actually measure the maximum pressure generated during carbonation.
Let's get some evidence!
