Kind of joking, but kind of serious. 2 liter soda bottles can withstand quite a bit of pressure without rupturing. If you wanted to replicate pressure from hundreds of gallons of brew, why not do it with psi.
Just brew a small batch, maybe one liter, put in bottle, cap and let ferment. I'm pretty sure the yeast would crap out and die from the pressure before the bottle burst, but precaution is a good idea either way. That otta kill off the little yeasties and get a quick taste for ya.
(This part is an edit cause I wanted to do the math for some fun)
You can quote me if I'm wrong, cause I'm not an engineer but heres some math for replicating brewery pressures just for funzies.
Pulled up numbers from quick google searches
One gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds. One gallon of water is 231 cubic inches, or 0.133681 cubic feet. So 8.34/231 equates to one cubic inch of water weighing .0361 pounds. I think >_<
That being said one cubic foot of water would exert 0.4332 PSI, or roughly a half a pound. All I did this for is to figure out how much water weighs if it stands one foot high. (A quick google search semi confirms this, they wiki.answers.com says 0.44)
Now, I've only been a home brewer for a short period of time, and I haven't really paid attention to how tall the average breweries fermenter would stand, but having looked at the things I would assume somewhere between 30 to 50ft. For my math I'll just say 40 ft for now. (Quote me if I'm wrong) A 40 foot fermenter containing liquid would exert about 17.328 PSI at the bottom. Thats actually not nearly as much as I had thought it would be. One more thing about this part is the calculations is strictly for pure water, not wart. So the numbers may be slightly skewed, but still within 5-10% I'm thinking.
Going back to Google which lead me to once again wiki.answers.com. One atmosphere is roughly 14.5 PSI. Once again... Not nearly as much as I thought it would have been. If I were to assume that the average carbonating pressure is 2-2.2 Atmospheres then that would only come out to about 14.5 PSI (Eleminating 1 atmosphere because its already there from the air pressure we all exist in). Didn't even use the old calculator for that one >_<
Going full circle. The average plastic bottle can hold 80 PSI safely with 100 PSI absolutely being the limit... Thanks Google... So if you were to try my 2 liter bottle theory and actually get the yeast up to 80 PSI you would be replicating about a 100 foot fermenting chamber. I don't think you would need to goto that extreme, but hey... It would be your call.
With all the math being done I've realized a few things having never really thought about all this before. One is that the giant fermenters that breweries use don't exert nearly as much pressure on the yeast cake as many (especially me) would think. Also, I don't know what kind of pressure it would take to kill off yeast, because obviously the brewing practice has proven that yeast can survive beyond 2 atmosphere with no problems.
I don't know how much pressure it takes to gernade the average glass bottle, but that does happen. I give it up to those little yeasties. They impress me with their tenacity.