I wrote about this last week, where the focus was on the Straub Brewery, in The Extinction Of Returnable Beer Bottles, but they did mention the decision by Yuengling to discontinue offering returnable bottles. Today my old hometown newspaper growing up, the Reading Eagle, picked up the story but centered instead on Yuengling. In Returnable Bottles Leave Beer Drinkers Cold, Dick Yuengling explains the reasons for discontinuing returnables.
Yuengling said returnable bottles still make great sense ecologically. He said that at one point 60 percent of his business was in returnable bottles.
“Now, if you showed a 16-ounce returnable bottle to a 22-year-old, he wouldn’t know what the heck it was,” Yuengling joked. “I like the idea. I installed a bottle washer at our new (Pottsville) location. I was going to try to revive the returnables but the customer just doesn’t want them anymore.”
According to the Beer Institute, in 1981 about 12% of beer sold was in returnable bottles. Today it’s just under 0.3% … and dropping fast. As I opined last week, even though I understand the rationale for this, I still can’t help but lament it. It just feels like a lost opportunity in our current obsession with being green. I did a lengthy feature article for All About Beer magazine a few years ago about brewery’s green practices, and I was astounded by how much most breweries, both big and small, were doing.
It seems like going back to returnables, while undoubtedly difficult and expensive, would be a great way to keep local beer local and show the craft beer industry’s leadership in recycling and being ecological. It may be nearly impossible to ramp up by any national company, but the smaller the brewery, the more manageable it could be, giving an advantage to local brewers. Oh, well, I know it’s not going to happen, but I can still dream.
It would make the most sense for a very tiny brewery which uses something like champagne bottles for conditioning. Which sounds like the kind of place I’d like to drink/buy beer!
It is a bummer to see returnable bottles fade into history. I have great memories of grabbing my dad a beer from the returnable case and sneaking a sip or two before handing it over. It was a great source of bottles for homebrewing too, but I guess that’s part of the problem!
Thankfully growler fills are really available now, especially at the local breweries, brew pubs, and beer bars. It seems like that makes even more sense since it reduces the amount of cleaning needed and relies on the customer to take care of their glassware. There is just nothing better than heading over to my local brewery (Weyerbacher) on a beer’s release weekend and filling up a growler! Tasting an IPA that fresh is the best!
I have an idea. Instead of returning bottles, rewashing them, and reusing them, how about we take a ton of energy, ship them all over the place and melt them only to re-form them into the very same bottle! It’s brilliant!
Seriously, we’ve regressed as a society. We paved over all the light rail for cars and now we have to pay billions to get them back. All bottles were returnable and now they aren’t. Amazing how going back 70 years in time would actually improve our society.
How well I remember when I was student in Ithaca, and how we would make monthly road trips down to Binghamton to pick up a few cases of Yuengling — and of course return our crates of empties.
I live in Edmonton, Alberta Canada and work for the Yukon Brewing Company. Up here all of our beer bottles are returnable. Almost all are reusable. We haven’t bought a new bottle for years. Brewing in Whitehorse, Yukon everything except the water has to be shipped in.
We use the industry standard bottle that most of the brewers across Canada use.
Dave
1970-72, my U of MD college roomies & I bought a lot of Rheingold, Ballantine, & Schaefer, occasionally Pabst (we hated National & Carling, which also were available; Yuengling wasn’t), for $3/case in returnables – we lost few at our frequent parties.
Today, the economics, tight living space for the majority of beer consumers, & the vastly improved variety of available brews make returnables unfeasible except for situations akin to what Mr. Gardner described. In most of the metropolitan areas in the US, it would be impossible – macro brew drinkers are lazy or environmentally disconnected; brew geeks recycle.
US craft brewers that bottle & are big into “being Green” are between rock & hard place to use returnables – the only way it can work is if there’s lmited distribution (state-wide max; in CA it could work only within specific areas that SN/Anchor/Stone & a few others could define for themselves). Traditional “longnecks” (thick glass & reusable) are all but extinct – today’s bottles are thinner glass & meant for recycling.
The macros & general American laziness killed returnables 30+ yrs ago – I tip my hat to those who, in the spirit of Don Quixote, fight the unbeatable fight & dare where the brave dare not go!