Nice reply, Weedeater. And bye the bye, Horhay, they were selling beer in cans, and on tap, at the last NASCAR race I watched, on 28 Oct., in Phoenix. No plastic bottles.
I have seen Bud, Coors, and Miller in 20 oz plastic bottles.
Most beers that I prefer to to drink are on tap, or come in a glass bottle, that does not have a twist off cap.
Don’t use homebrewing as your baseline for what works and why–if you search long enough on the net, you’ll find somebody who swears by any damn fool way of turning sweet barley water into fizzy brown pop. Also, homebrewers are re-using their plastic implements (such as buckets for fermenting), so they have a chance to get the plastic taste out of the plastic. Beer manufacturers, who aren’t going to be re-using the plastic bottles, don’t have that option. It’s gotta taste like not-plastic the first time.
Are you saying that ethanol dissolves certain plastics?
I enjoy beer and homebrew my own. I have a very educated palate when it comes to beer. I am knowledgeable (I thought) about the pros and cons of various storage containers for beer. I know, for certain, plastic sucks as a storage container for beer.
I’m also a regular consumer of Jack Daniel’s. Even with my “educated palate” I can’t tell the difference between Jack from a glass bottle and Jack from those little plastic bottles served on airplanes (in a mixed drink, although I admit I’ve never sucked the Jack straight from one of those wee bottles). Jack is much higher proof than beer. If Ferrous is correct then logic would dictate Jack would dissolve plastic at a higher rate than beer.
I concur with the fact that beer out of plastic tastes like plastic, but I’m not convinced it’s the “dissolvative” (I made up that word) properties of beer that make it so, i.e. “you’re tasting the plastic dissolved by the ethanol”.
Does ethanol (or anything else in beer) dissolve plastic???
Slight hijack, but I’m pretty sure the Mr Beer thing is of a different grade plastic than the plastic thing from the water cooler at work.
I made the mistake of doing a batch of homebrew in the plastic water jug (carboy) from work and ugh, it tasted rancid! I abandoned the whole batch after sampling two or three bottles. As was mentioned before, the alcohol is a solvent, and I suspect it just kinda ate the plastic away in the brew. On a Mr. Beer (or any food-grade plastic fermenter) the plastic is presumably more robust and doesn’t leak into to the beer. I do most of my brewing in plastic fermenters and don’t run into any real problems, other than potential oxidation, which has yet to affect the taste so far as I can tell.
I’d guess any plastic used for bottles would be of the higher, food-grade plastic as well.
And as a PS, I got much better tasting brew when I upgraded from the Mr Brew to a more sophisticated system. 
Plasticizers are the plastic problem. Some plastics “leech” plasticizers for a period of time, and solvents no doubt aid this process.
As well, alcohols simply dissolve some plastics. But we use spectrophotometric analysis here at work, and we certainly use plastic for much of it, so this isn’t something that must apply to plastic in general but rather specific types of plastic.
To refer back to my earlier post, this is why there’s a distinction between food-grade and non-food-grade plastics. If you’re putting beer in it, it had better be food-grade.
Oops. Went away for a while there. Yes, my last post was imprecise. As Jargetnt and erislover pointed out, alcohol will dissolve some kinds of plastic. There are many different kinds of plastics. Obviously the kind used in liquor bottles would be of a type not dissolved by alcohol. The food-grade plastic buckets available at homebrew stores (among other places, I presume) are fine for making beer, but the 5-gallon plastic paint buckets you find in hardware stores (which look the same) are definitely not.
It is not appropraite in General Questions to call anyone a redneck. Don’t do it again.
This is not appropriate language in General Question, no matter what instigated it, your half-hearted apology notwithstanding. Accusations of trolling should be handled via e-mail to a moderator or administrator, or if you must, in the Pit.
No, it was not appropriate at all in GQ. Do I really need to spell that out?
I hope the OP’s question has been answered, because I’m closing this thread.
bibliophage
moderator GQ