Here’s an interesting little snapshot of the various containers beer comes in over the last thirty years from the Container Recycling Institute. In Container Types Used For Beer in the U.S., 1981-2010 , they detail how beer in bottles have increased steadily 15% over that time and now make up almost 40% of how beer is sold. At the same time, draft beer has receded. Cans are still on top, but dipped significantly beginning in the 1990s, but in recent years have started to rebound.
Wednesday’s ad is for Schlitz from 1912, and is touting brown bottles as the best package for beer. I don’t imagine UV light was as well understood a century ago, but Schlitz assures us that even then “chemists of this country as well have repeatedly warned against the possible dangers to purity following the use of light glass bottles.” And I love this gem. “Dark bottles only are used for beer in Germany and England.” Many? Undoubtedly. Most? Probably. Every brewery? Hmm, I’m sure someone can speak to the veracity of that claim, but I tend to think absolute claims are a bad idea. You can find an exception to almost anything. And I especially love their final words, urging people to choose Schlitz because they know best. “If you knew what we know about beer, you would say ‘Schlitz—Schlitz in Brown Bottles.’”
This isn’t exactly new, but it’s still pretty cool, despite using green bottles. They may not be great for keeping UV light out of the beer, but they do work great for building Christmas trees. Completed in 2006, 2000 Heineken bottles are controlled by animated lighting equipment built by the homeowner.
At least a dozen people have e-mailed me a link to this video, so I bow to the will of the people and share it with the remaining couple of people who may not yet have seen it. It’s a simple idea, using beer bottles (and some liquor bottles, too) in place of dominoes, but is fairly well executed. Enjoy.
Recycle Now, the organization putting on Recycle Week, which begins today, has a very cool little animated video showing the process that beer bottles go through during the recycling process.
Glass Bottles – how they are recycled from RecycleNow on Vimeo.
I stumbled in this fun little project, a model of the Roman Coliseum made entirely of beer bottles. It was the Telegraph’s Picture of the Day back in May of 2009.
A model of the Colosseum made of 1,500 bottles of Heineken is displayed at Rome’s Termini Station to celebrate the final of the Champion’s League. The sculpture has a diameter of 11.5 feet and a height of 4.6 feet.
Watch in horror as several pallets of beer miss their calling to be imbibed and enjoyed and instead end up creating a river of beer inside a warehouse at an undisclosed location. The only clue is that the language of alarm heard in the background does not sound like English. Apart from that, it’s anybody’s guess. Oh, the horror!
Tip of the hat to Todd Alstrom from Beer Advocate , who noticed that Cambridge Brewing Co.‘s Will Meyers tweeted out a link to a short survey asking his customers a few questions about buying beer in bottles, suggesting the brewpub is considering bottling some of the their beer. Here’s the introduction to the survey.
Thank you for taking the time to fill out this survey. Your answers will help determine the future of a Cambridge Brewing Company bottling program, and provide you with the beers you want in your local store. At this time, we are only in the beginning stages of planning our roll-out, but our success depends on you. So please let us know what you think, and what you want to drink.
Will later confirmed CBC’s plan to bottle, tweeting “Yup! Damn PSYCHED!” And to another, tweeted back that they’re “Considering it, but most interested in making our funkier beers. Lots of great ambers/pales out there already!” So that suggests they’re considering bottling the more interesting one-off and barrel-aged beers that Will has marinating in the basement … er, cellar. And that, I think, is most excellent news.
This week’s work of art is by Eddie Morman, created for Abita Brewing. Of the four works available at Abita’s online store, two are paintings of Abita beer bottles. The first painting is of an Amber bottle.
And the second is for Purple Haze.
There isn’t any information about the artist, sadly, but I suspect he’s a local and the two works are fairly recent.
Our 48th Session is hosted by Simon Johnson of the Reluctant Scooper. He’s chosen as his topic the age-old question about which package is best: “Cask, Keg, Can, Bottle?.”
The method of beer dispense often raises the hackles of even the most seasoned beer drinker. Some evangilise about living, breathing cask as being the one true way. Others heartily support the pressurised keg. The humble tinny has its fans. Lovers of bottled beer, either conditioned or pasturised, can be equally voiciferous.
Perhaps you think that one method magnifiies a beer’s impact. Perhaps you won’t try a beer if it’s dispensed in a way you don’t agree with. Perhaps you’ve tried one beer that’s been dispensed every which way.
The question is simple but your answer may not be: Cask, Keg, Can, Bottle: Does dispense matter
I’m not necessarily a champion of any one beer delivery system over the rest. It seems to me that each contributes something to the final product, the beer. And while I applaud CAMRA’s efforts, especially early on, they seem to be stuck in the past these days continuing to promote the idea that cask beer is the only beer, whereas many forward-thinking British brewers are making great beer that’s kegged and bottled. I personally feel they should embrace any beer that tastes good and lose their preoccupation with one delivery system. (I have been a member of CAMRA, but my membership is currently lapsed.) I should also say that’s only how CAMRA seems to me from 5,000 miles away, it’s just my perception. I could be totally off base on that.
That being said, I must confess a weakness for cask beer, and generally order a beer on cask or in a firkin if a bar offers one. But that has more to do with wanting to encourage every bar, or at least all the good ones, to keep at least some cask or firkin beer on their menu. That, and cask beer in the U.S. is still uncommon enough that I still get excited when I discover that a new place has some. I suspect if I lived in England where it is far more common, that my choices might be different. Certainly whenever I visit the UK I rarely order beer that’s not on cask, unless it’s something special that’s not available on cask, as is increasingly the case from small artisanal British and Scottish brewers.
I really do love cask beer, especially when comparing the same beer on cask and on keg or bottled. While many people complain about cask beer seeming flat, I think the lack of carbonation allows you to taste more of the flavors of the beer that are often masked by the CO2 in non-cask beer.
Which brings us to kegs, which for many, many beers work just fine, as far as I’m confirmed. Certainly nitrogen kegs have a smooth taste as a generality and many regular CO2 kegs have that bubbly carbonation that for some beers works quite well, many lager styles for example seem to me to be improved by the carbonation, which give them a cleanliness of sorts — scrubbing bubbles is how I often think of them.
Bottles, of course, allow us to be able to drink many more beers from around the country and the world because they make it possible for the beer to travel farther and last longer. Of course, clear bottles and green bottles pervert those advantages with new problems, but brown seems to do a pretty good job. I once read that red bottles would actually offer the most UV light protection, but apparently they’re prohibitively expensive for some reason (or perhaps it’s just a matter of little or no demand?). I’ve actually only seen one red bottle, which was a specialty beer I picked up at the Trumer Brauerei in Salzburg, Austria. I’ve also seen white and blue bottles, too, but have no idea how they compare.
Then, of course, there’s bottle-conditioned beers, with live yeast in them that continue to ferment in the bottle. For me, they’re the preferred bottle for many, if not, most styles of beer. Interestingly, the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in bottles — which is bottle-conditioned — uses a slightly different recipe for their kegged pale ale, and have been experimenting with essentially a keg-conditioned version that they’re hoping will more closely approximate the bottled version.
Of course, the question also leaves out the hybrid package: growlers. Growlers are essentially a hand-bottled keg or cask beer that you can take home with you, but you have only a day or two in which to drink it. So it’s not exactly the best of both worlds, but it is a great way to try a draft-only beer in another setting.
Cans are the wild card, I think. For so long, they were dismissed as a package. Back in the early days, brewers and other beer folk (myself included) hailed the brown beer bottle as the package for craft beer. So convincing was the argument at the time that I think it’s actually slowed the acceptance of craft beer in cans. Because the issues of beer in cans — specifically metal turbidity, which is metal leeching into the beer — have been largely solved. And beyond that, cans have many advantages over bottles. I’ve been involved in several side-by-side tastings of canned vs. kegged beer and the consensus in every case has been that no discernible difference can be detected. Is anyone yet doing a can-conditioned beer?
In the end, yes, I think the package does matter, but not to the point where I’d ever pass on a beer on that basis alone. Ultimately, it’s what the beer tastes like that’s most important. The package may determine that to some extent, and some do a better job with certain beers, but enough certainly seem suited to their primary package for it not to matter. As long as it ends up in my glass, I’m going to drink it, and I’ll probably enjoy it, too.