{I suspect there may not be a factual answer to this, so I haven’t put it in GQ, but mods please feel free to move it}
In the course of, ahem, recent research, I’ve noticed that “premium” - that is, more expensive and often imported - bottled beers tend to come in green bottles, often with white paper labels: Stella, Becks, Heineken {here in NZ it’s positioned as premium}, Steinlager, Tuborg, Carlsberg, Haagen, Grolsch. This doesn’t seem to be a local phenomenon, as most of the overseas magazine adverts I’ve seen - Becks and Stella, for example - follow the same pattern.
In contrast, most of the local mass-market {and cheaper} beers tend to come, if not in cans, in brown bottles. There are exceptions to this, of course: Macs and Monteiths, two local boutique breweries, do use brown bottles, and Mexican beers seem to come in clear bottles, but in general the pattern seems to hold true. Green is expensive, brown is cheap.
So why is this? Unless there’s something about glass-making I’m unaware of, it doesn’t seem that green glass would be substantially more expensive than brown or clear, so why does imported, expensive beer - or local beer that aspires to the same cachet - come in green bottles?
The only explanations I’ve been able to come up with are marketing ones. The first is that green bottles are more aesthetically appealing - well, they *do[/I look nice - the second, and the one that I lean to, is that they’re aiming for an association with {supposedly more prestigious} with wine, especially when you consider the white paper labels. Beer in green bottles wants to look like wine.
The marketing implication seems to be that if you drink from a green bottle - or even if you’re civilised and use a glass - you’re not just Joe Schmo sucking down the piss after work, that you are a gentleman of taste and discrimination, akin to a connoiseur of fine wine: hence both the price and the cachet.