Equipment

Bottles and pressure: what glass will and will not hold

Which bottles are safe for sparkling cider?

In short

A bottle intended for sparkling wine is a different object from a still-wine bottle. It is heavier, thicker, has a deep punt to distribute stress, a reinforced neck and finish designed for a crown cap or a mushroom cork, and it is manufactured and tested against a design pressure.

Manufacturers state a working pressure and a higher test pressure for these bottles; the figures commonly quoted for sparkling-wine glass are around six bar of working pressure. A still-wine bottle carries no such rating and no such testing.

Because pressure in a bottle-conditioned cider is produced by fermentation and continues while sugar remains, a bottle is not a container that holds a known pressure — it is a container that holds whatever pressure the yeast eventually generates.

Why sparkling bottles are shaped the way they are

The punt — the deep dome pushed up into the base — is structural. A flat glass base under internal pressure is a plate in bending and concentrates stress at the edge; a domed one carries the load in compression, which glass is far better at. The heavy shoulder and the thick, reinforced neck do the same job at the other end, and the pronounced ring at the mouth exists so that a wire cage has something to hook under and so that a crown cap has a proper sealing surface.

Weight is the visible consequence: an empty sparkling-wine bottle is noticeably heavier than a still-wine bottle of the same volume. That difference is glass thickness, and glass thickness is what holds the pressure.

Bottles used for beer sit between the two. A returnable beer bottle is designed for the carbonation levels of beer and is substantially stronger than a still-wine bottle, while a lightweight one-trip beer bottle is designed to be used once and to be filled with a product at a known, controlled carbonation. Neither is designed for the pressures a champagne-method cider reaches.

What actually fails, and how

Glass does not fail at a single pressure. It fails from a flaw — a scratch, a chip at the rim, a bruise from a bottle knocking another on a line or in a crate — and the pressure at which a flawed bottle fails is much lower and much less predictable than the pressure a sound one will take. This is why reusing bottles requires inspection, and why bottles that have been scuffed around the body by years of handling are retired in commercial reuse systems.

Failure is also temperature-dependent, because pressure in a sealed bottle rises with temperature and because a warm bottle-conditioned cider ferments faster. A case of bottles that has been stable in a cold cellar can become dangerous in a warm room or a car in summer.

When a pressurised bottle fails it does not crack quietly. It fragments, and the fragments travel. Injuries from exploding bottles in home brewing and cider making are documented and include serious eye and hand injuries.

The rules that follow

Bottle safetyNever put a carbonating or carbonated cider into a still-wine bottle, a screw-cap wine bottle, a jar, or any bottle whose original contents were not carbonated. Use bottles made for sparkling wine or for beer, matched to the carbonation intended, and use the closure the finish is designed for. Inspect every bottle for chips at the rim and scratches on the body, and reject any that are damaged. Store bottle-conditioned cider cool, in a crate or a closed box, out of living space. Wear eye protection when handling suspect bottles, and if a batch is over-carbonated, chill it thoroughly before doing anything at all with it.

Bottle types in use

Bottles and what they are made for
Bottle	Designed for	Closure it takes	Suitable for carbonated cider?
Sparkling-wine (champagne) bottle	Traditional-method sparkling wine; manufactured and tested to a stated pressure	Crown cap during conditioning; mushroom cork and muselet for finish	Yes, to the manufacturer’s rating
Returnable beer bottle	Beer carbonation, repeated washing and reuse	Crown cap	Yes, at beer-range carbonation
Lightweight one-trip beer bottle	A single fill at a controlled carbonation	Crown cap	Only at modest carbonation, and once
Swing-top bottle	Carbonated soft drinks and beer	Integral ceramic or plastic stopper with a gasket	Yes at modest carbonation, if the gasket is sound
Still-wine bottle	Still wine at atmospheric pressure	Straight cork or screw cap	No, under any circumstances
PET bottle	Carbonated soft drinks	Screw cap	Yes within its own rating; it deforms visibly before failing, which is a useful warning, but it passes oxygen

A historical footnote

The connection between strong glass and sparkling drinks is not incidental. English glasshouses of the seventeenth century, fired with coal rather than wood, produced a darker, stronger bottle than was available elsewhere, and it was that bottle — together with cork — that made it possible to keep a fermenting drink under its own pressure. Worlidge’s account of cider in the 1670s describes bottling cider with some sugar remaining and stopping it tightly to produce a sparkling drink.

The practice therefore predates its association with Champagne, and it also predates any understanding of why bottles burst. Contemporary accounts of losses in the cellar are frank about the proportion of bottles that failed.

Also answered on this page

Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.

Can I use wine bottles for sparkling cider?
What pressure does a champagne bottle hold?
Why do cider bottles explode?

What people ask next

Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.

Why did my cider bottles explode — Because fermentable sugar was still present, or too much priming sugar was used, and the pressure exceeded what the bottle could hold. Never bottle a cider whose gravity is still falling, and never use bottles not designed for pressure.
How do crown caps work and what capper do i need
How do you pour bottle conditioned cider — Stand the bottle upright for a day, chill it, and pour in one continuous movement, stopping when the sediment reaches the shoulder. Some traditions deliberately rouse the sediment instead, and both are defensible.
How is sparkling cider made
How much pressure builds up in a bottle of cider — Enough to matter. Every gram of sugar fermented in a sealed bottle produces gas, and a bottle not rated for it can fail. The French cider appellations require a minimum of 1.0 to 1.5 bar at 20 °C, and a bottle-conditioned cider can go well beyond that if it was filled with more sugar than intended.
What is priming sugar — Priming sugar is a measured dose of sugar added at bottling so that the remaining yeast produces carbon dioxide inside the sealed bottle. Too much of it is the usual cause of burst bottles.

Sources

What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.

The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.
Cider and perry production technical training material
Peter Mitchell / Cider and Perry Academy · reference work · registered as competent for this subject
Searched again on 2026-08-25 and it remains the one printed source here that a bibliographic check cannot fix, because it is not a published work with an edition. It is course material issued to participants of a training programme, so there is no catalogue record to verify, no ISBN, and no lawful public copy. Its state stays `registered` for that reason rather than through inattention.
Vinetum Britannicum, or a Treatise of Cider
John Worlidge · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1676
Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1678 edition held by the Internet Archive. John Worlidge, active 1669–1698; the work ran to further editions including 1691, so a citation to it should say which. The full title is broader than the short one CiderHQ uses and matters for what the book can be cited for: it covers other fruit wines and drinks alongside cider, so it is evidence about seventeenth-century English fruit fermentation generally rather than about cider alone.

Where to go next

Cider making equipment — The rest of the equipment material, grouped by what each piece is for.
How cider is made — The methods this equipment exists to carry out.
Troubleshooting — The faults that are traced back to equipment and to cleaning.