Assessments are made of the conditions required to test stochastic growth theory (SGT) in laboratory plasmas, with illustrative applications to the generic class of beam–plasma experiments motivated by their close connection with solar radio emissions. The experiments should operate in the bump-on-tail instability regime in unmagnetized and collisionless/weakly collisional plasmas, in which density fluctuations scatter Langmuir waves out of resonance and lead the beam–Langmuir system to reach a SGT state. The density fluctuations vital to the experiments may pre-exist or could be launched as ion-sound or ion-sound-like MHD waves, with characteristic scales to optimize the evolution of the system to a SGT state. The required conditions appear feasible on representative current devices, provided the required density fluctuations are available.