do any breweries still use returnable beer bottles? if so, where can i buy them?
Look to your local microbrewery.
I don’t know any micros that use returnables.
Not real long ago I saw a couple cases of returnables in the beer storage area of the local Pick n Save. The brands were Pabst Blue Ribbon, Blatz, Blatz light, and Old Milwaukee. The prices per case (24 bottles) was about 50 cents more than if one bought 2 12 packs of non-returnable glass bottles, and a buck more than if one bought a case of cans. Considering having to pay the deposit and then haul the things back to the store why bother?
Maybe Quebec requires it, but all beer bottles here are returnable and maybe even the cans (I never buy cans).
As you can see bottles and cappers are available online. Mr. Beer
If the OP is asking for returnable beer bottles for making their own beer, soda, or other drinks, then check out any good homebrewing supply store.
I know that you could get Blatz in returnable bottles at a few beer depots here in Milwaukee as of 2003. I don’t know if they still do it, though.
What exactly do you mean by this? If you are looking to homebrew, besides buying bottles from any reputable homebrew store (I like Northern Brewer ), you can also use any beer bottle that isn’t a twist-off or champagne-style, and get standard crown caps and a capper. (You can reuse champagne-style but that requires a special corker and corks.) If you get swingtops with the metal latch and rubber-gasketed cap, those are even easier to cap; just be sure you properly clean and sanitize around that gasket.
returnable beer bottles… yes, i am looking for bottles for home brewing. i have been to a couple home brew stores and online, but the bottles they sell dont seem to be any thicker than the throw-aways. the ones i remember were twice as thick and twice as heavy. just wanted to eliminate any possibility of beer bottle explosions.
I worry about this as well, but so far it seems that all the bottles I’ve used have held up alright to the pressure. I will say that the “for homebrewing” bottles my local store sells look no different than most reusable bottles I see.
I’ve had a few bottle bombs but those were from very, very high-alcohol items (1 beer, 1 mead) that probably hadn’t finished fermenting properly. Check your gravity and be sure you have complete fermentations, and keep beer cool when possible otherwise, and you should be OK.
And just don’t do yeast-carbonated sodas or sweet meads in glass.
Slight hiijack: Why has America gotten away from returnables? Last time I was in Germany beer was sold in 20-bottle racks (like a milkcrate, kinda), and you would get money towards your next rack upon returning the empties and the carrier.
Is it the recycling drive that’s caused this or is there some other economic/environmental factors at play?
I know some states still do returns…why not all?
You beat me to the hi-jack. When I was a kid in the 60’s beer and pop was sold in returnable bottles. I’m just assuming it was cheaper to do so for the manufacturer. Pop was sold as a 6 pack and beer was sold in reusable cardboard cases. Every grocery store had a roller rack you put your bottles on that would go to the back room. Seems to me the cashier closest to the rack had to issue a receipt for the bottles or give out the money.
do any breweries still use returnable beer bottles? if so, where can i buy them?
I’ve got heaps of them. How many do you want and how much postage are you willing to pay? What country do you live in?
In the 70’s I worked in a grocery store. I did bottle returns. You have to keep a giant wheeled rack or two up front, and deal with bottles when they come in. People hate bringing them back and getting a shopping cart or more full of bottles was not uncommon. The bottles are sticky and full of fermenting soda and beer or worse. Now I had to empty at least two giant return carts every night and often a couple more times. Now we get to storage. The bottles went into the distributor’s trays they delivered pop in and were stacked. The bottles had to all be separated by distributor, and stacked until they picked up their bottles. The bottles took up about 25% of the stock room. Bottles fell and sometimes stacks fell. I spent anywhere from 30 minutes a night to a couple hours sorting, storing and restacking returns in back. A couple times they had me sort bottles and stack the whole shift. The truck then comes and they take the bottles back to be washed and reused. There’s a lot of labor in this and then you have chipped and worn bottles showing up in the new product.
Plastic bottles showed up and all those labor intensive reusable bottles that people , stores, and vendors hate to deal with started to disappear.
About the same time recycling glass bottles was starting to be pushed, and used bottles wouldn’t be filling up the landfills when not refilled. They could sell a thinner glass bottled product and let the towns deal with the bottles which get sold back as material for bottles. Not that they won’t have used the thinner non refill bottles regardless.
Beer cans are returnable across Canada, as are beer bottles. Bottles are returned to the brewer for washing and refilling. Cans that are returned are sold by weight to aluminum companies. I worked for Ontario’s Beer Stores years ago, and this is how things worked then–and over my subsequent years of travelling across Canada and buying, consuming, and returning beer bottles and cans, I don’t see that things have changed at all.
I use Point (Stevens Point Brewing Company) returnables for my brewing. I’ve also seen Leinenkugels in returnables, as well as the ones mentioned in post #3. I usually try to use a couple old Corona bottle too, since they are clear and it’s easier to see the finished product.
I remember those days. In the late 70’s I worked at a Snyder Drug/Red Owl grocery store.
Soda usually came in 8-packs (16 ounce bottles). Returning them was a pain for the customer and a double pain for us that had to deal with them in the store. Returnable beer cases were actually easier (not easy, just easier) to deal with as the could be stacked. Empty soda bottles didn’t sit well in that bin.
My fondest memory though was that 24
bottle cases of Red, White, & Blue or Kingsbury beer was $1.88 a case. The damn deposit was $1.20, almost as much as the beer itself. For the money those were good beers, too!