If pressurizing growlers works for you, then go for it I guess. Other than the fact that standard beer bottles are sold and exchanged in the millions on a daily basis through commercial beers and hobbyists, largely without exploding, I certainly don't claim to have any data or results from scientific experiments or whatever to prove the relative efficacy of a growler for doing the same task. My point is simply that different vessels are designed and intended for different purposes and for me, there's no good reason whatsoever to "test" the ability of a 60oz glass jug to hold internal pressure when it is so dead easy to find containers that have such extensive track records of safely holding beverages under pressure.
I mentioned the 2L soda bottle not because it's something I would choose, but as an extreme example to illustrate how readily available carbonation-pressure-friendly containers are. It's ugly but it's essentially free, it's functional, and it's effectively bullet-proof in terms of its ability to safely hold pressure from carbonated beverages.
If you've had 10 bottles blow up then I'd say something's off; that shouldn't happen if you're even approximately following a sound process. Before moving to kegs I filled a few thousand bottles and I definitely had some gushers and the like, but not a single grenade. And I am definitely not a process nazi.
You can't play it both ways. Beer bottles aren't necessarily meant to bottle ferment either. They are meant to store beer like a growler is with similar level of carbonation. And you can get soda bottles of all sizes so why glass at all then?
We were all newbies once but I have bottled thousands of bottles too. The 10 is a "no more than" number for 1-2 bottles in a few batches with the majority being from 20+ years ago. Those were likely infected and may have have sat in storage for a longer period. They were sitting and not drunk so they either sucked for some reason or I buried them and forgot them. One or two were weaker thin walled bottles, which I remember noting but don't recall if there was a batch problem. I did have two last year that were either a miscalculation from spillage of primer or perhaps an infection. They gushed but didn't seem off flavor but no way of knowing exactly.
But let's be clear, as long as I have a growler handy, I use it when bottling. So even if I did something wrong in those batches, there's a good chance the error was carried over to the growler. Most of these were a long time ago but the two that broke last year were wheats and I did use that clear growler for that batch. Obviously it didn't break, it did gush, and that growler is nearly 25 years old too BTW.
A very reasonable guess is I've bottle fermented in a growler at least 100 times. I pretty much always aim for 6 gallon batches (all-grain) with the gallon over being for 1-2 growlers and the rest for a keg. Growlers travel easy and it's not hard to pull off a growler when filling the keg. I'm genuinely curious about why this is being said. Is it based on data or is it just something getting repeated. It doesn't matter to me one way or the other, I've got five flip tops, 3 are thick walled glass and 2 are stainless steel. I also have 3 3 gallon kegs and a 1.75, I have options to address the extra gallon if needed.
People report bottle bombs occasionally but jrgtr42's so far is the one time I have read of a growler probably breaking due to pressure. Lots of posts I haven't read here though.
