I’ve recently become interested in the art of sabrage, that is, opening champagne (or beer, if you must) with a sabre or chef’s knife. Essentially, the technique involves applying a buncha pressure to the point of stress on a bottle, where the seam meets the lip, so that the top is separated from the rest and the bottle is opened.
I’ve been practicing lately and getting quite good at the technique (although this weekend I struggled with very-cheap bottles that seemed to be made differently, any thoughts???). I anticipate doing this a lot more, and so I would like to see if I can’t avoid this happening. Can anyone tell me why the bottle in that video shattered?
Having never heard of this practice before encountering your post (thanks for expanding my universe a tad), and being that the only examples of it I have seen are the two videos to which your post links – one a master who gives us a brief history of the practice, has a dedicated implement for its execution, and carries the deed off with suave aplomb; the other, by contrast, a novice at best and more likely hack dabbler who employs a turned around vegetable chopper and prefaces his flailing effort with “…he said something about…” – I am confident I can pontificate with that special conviction and patness afforded only to the ignorant: It’s the difference between squeezing the trigger and pulling it, respectively.
My guess is that he didn’t hit the bottle lip hard enough. I think it works like this - The blade contacts the lip of the bottle, causing a horizontal crack. Momentum from the sabre and internal pressure keeps forcing the cork and rim out, so the crack continues to run around the neck, breaking the rim and cork away. If the initial crack is not clearly horizontal or right through, then (because glass is amorphous) the internal pressure causes the cracks to grow in random directions, making the bottle explode. The other possibility is that the knife chipped the bottle on the seam on the way up, and provided an additional shatter zone once the rim was hit.
And I wouldn’t like to do this with beer, for fear that the internal pressure is not enough to wash any glass chips away. But if you gave me a large supply of sparkling wine, I’d love to do the sort of research that quantifies the impact parameters for a successful attempt.
I have been told that you should really only do this with French champagne (redundant, I know) because the bottles are thicker. That suggests that there are thinner bottles which obviously might shatter.
**Zsofia: **Your comment is inline with anecdotal evidence from the guys who made the bottle explode in the video, they were experimenting on behalf of Wired Magazine to produce this article. Apparently the bottle that didn’t make it was indeed American.
When I experimented with ultra-cheap french bottles (mind you the knife I was using was somewhat puny) I found they just didn’t show any response. Decent Champagne appeared to at least chip when struck if not done properly (when done properly the top comes off in one strike every time).
I know this is quite dead but someone might find this interesting
Recently I have found success doing this with beer and even malt liquor. I’ve done it a couple of times with a mikes hard lemonade and Smirnoff with the back end of a pocketknife. Not bragging just confused on what the reason is for the bottle exploding instead of breaking the lip off.
I will say if you do this be warned that there still might be glass shards in the liquid and recommend pouring 1/4 out before drinking. This is for show and I am not responsible for anything / recommending you do this with intention of drinking the beverage.
It seems to me that, unless you were using a bottle-conditioned beer, all of those beverages would have far less carbonation in them than a proper bottle of champagne, so there’d be less pressure to release and less chance of things going explosively wrong.
I wonder if OP ever managed to up their sword game.
If the guy in the first video is correct and it is stress, its because the champagne bottles are produced in a mould [otherwise there would be no seam], and the lip was applied as a secondary application of melty glass and fashioned into the correct profile. As it cools it will introduce a ring of stress at the base of the join, and that is where force fracture will be transmitted along the ring of greatest stress and separate the top and the neck.
Looking now at an Australian white wine bottle at hand, it has a two seams from being moulded, but they continue onto the threads of the closure. So there is no separate ‘top’ that can be knocked off - the bottle is all one [two melded halves] piece. The bloke in the second video is lucky he still has five fingers.
As an archaeologist I’ve looked at literally tens of thousands of broken bottle pieces. They break in clear patterns. When all bottles were produced the way that champagne bottles were during the 19th and early 20th century, breakage from any cause was likely to see the top separate from the neck and body at the same place that would happen through sabrage.
Back in my mispent youth, I was hanging out with some friends. Someone had left the screen door open, and there were several flies in the room. In those days you could buy firecrackers, so we started amusing ourselves by shooting flies with nickels. Wait until a fly settles on the ceiling, position an empty beer bottle directly under, then put a lit firecracker in the bottle and a nickel on the rim. We actually got 2 or 3 flies that way (never asked what his landlord thought about the dents in the ceiling).
After about 10 tries, on the last one the bottle exploded instead. Glass can be fickle if stressed. Obviously a dozen explosions created fractures that expressed themselves at the last one. Presumably most bottles have gone through a decent annealing, but a piece of glass can contain stress - not enough to break unless encouraged by an event. Working with glass can be interesting.
I guess the question is - can you consistently blow up the entire bottle depending on how you hit it? Is it a consistent brand (presumably all bottles from the same manufacturer treated the same)? Or is it, as mentioned above, dependent on how and where the bottle is struck?
Glass can have very weird internal stresses, such that it can withstand extreme violence, but then shatter with the lightest of touches, in the wrong place. The most extreme example of this is Prince Rupert’s Drops, but similar effects can happen in anything made of glass.
Back around 1975 it was 4th of July. I dropped a small firecracker into an empty Coors bottle expecting some sort of fountain of smoke and an interesting noise. Nope.
Got a shower of finely shattered glass instead. The bottle hadn’t been abused in any way before that first firecracker. “Black Cat” brand firecracker, about 1-1/8" x 3/16".
The nearby parental units were unimpressed with my teenaged judgment.
I remember seeing a scene on TV recently where someone tried to do this and chopped off their finger. It was a show my wife was watching without me, on one of the streaming platforms. Anyone know what I might be talking about?
It’s worth noting that the pressure in a Champagne bottle from France is about 6 bar (90 psi); in contrast, a bottle of Prosecco, from northeast Italy, has a pressure of about 3.5 bar (51 psi). I have no idea what the pressure in a cheap American “champagne” is.
I have a bottle of French Champers and a bottle of Prosecco in my fridge. They are both 75cl but the weight difference is significant.
Doing this to champagne is wasteful in a most proletarian vulgar way.
And doing it with beer bottles is just plain superfluous. It is so easy to open a bottle of beer with no waste, no shards and no leaking: look (It’s in German, but the pictures speak for themselves, and only 45 seconds long). If you don’t have a lighter, any wooden spoon/knife handle/screwdriver will do.