Bleed pressure from swing-top bottle?

I use 1 litre swing-top bottles to make kombucha. Yes, I know it's not really homebrew in some people's eyes, but I figured someone here could help.

Depending on what ingredients I use, sometimes I have a bottle with a lot more than the usual amount of pressure. (Usually, I can just pop it right open.) With these higher-pressure ones, I have to manually hold the top open ever so slightly to bleed off the pressure, or open it suddenly and loose about 30% of the tasty beverage.

Is there any way to prevent this, and bleed off the pressure without me having to hold the bottle for 10 minutes?

Edit: I should have elaborated further. The times when there's way too much pressure is when I bottle it with a fruit additive, so there's lots more sugar in the bottled product than a normal one, sans fruit.

Topic kombucha bottle carbonation homebrew

Category Mac

1
answered at

During secondary fermentation (bottling stage, aka 2F) of kombucha brewing, there is a correlation between sugar as an input and carbonation as an output. If you increase the sugar in the 2F ingredients, carbonation will increase. If you're getting too much carbonation during 2F, you can do one or both of the following.

Burp the bottles throughout the 2F process. If you suspect there's a lot of carbonation building up (because you've added fruit, or you have a test bottle set up to monitor carbonation levels) simply pick an interval (daily, etc) and open the bottle. Doing this will prevent over-carbonation.

And/or, vary the amount of sugar being added as an ingredient to 2F when bottling. Add less fruit. Or, if you like the amount of fruit your adding, then you need to decrease the amount of sugar in the kombucha fluid you're bottling. To get a less sugary kombucha fluid, allow your primary fermentation (1F) cycle to run longer. For example, if you bottle after day 7 in 1F, wait for day 8, 9, 10, etc to bottle.

1
answered at

What you're describing is a "gusher infection", wild yeast that can consume normally unfermentable sugars like dextrins. Usually leaves a beverage with little body and other issues.

In beer after the cap pops a gusher will just usually slowly volcano, taking most the beer with it as foam. Some can over carb so much to vacate the bottle almost instantly.

As far as your kambucha getting it very cold 33°F and slowly releasing the CO2 is the only solution. Unless you have access to hyperbaric chamber. :-)

Better sanitation and a fresh scoby should rid you of the wild yeast in future batches.

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