Antique bottles are found by people at flea markets and garage sales but are more often retrieved by sifting through old junkyards – even abandoned or unofficial junkyards – where they can be fund intact and easily restored.
While antique beer bottles are our interest here there are many other collectible antique bottles including ink bottles, castor oil bottles, seltzer water bottles and any of many kinds of cobalt blue bottles. Many people use these as window decorations but you may in fact be sitting on (or looking at, as it were) a goldmine.
Find antique beer bottles now!
Find antique beer bottles from domestic or imported brands from throughout brewing history. |
Antique bottle caps from the brewing past. |
Antique beer bottles are not all that common for a number of reasons.
Beer bottles were only used widely in manufacture starting in the 1870's. The bottling process was not really practical and much of the beer that was bottled was simply lost due to poor sanitation and other problems in the process.
Antique beer bottles: pottered. Many of the earliest beer bottles were pottered, quite often plain brown and closed with wired cork or lightning catcher as they were called. These are beautiful collector's items but in terms of practicality they had to give way to cheaper technology that could be used by breweries to produce and sell beer in larger quantities.
The advent of larger scale beer bottling. Even then beer was produced by very small, local breweries as there were no large distribution channels. The many thousands of breweries all across the United States during the era of 1870 through the early 1900's were not at all unlike today's microbreweries. The variations in bottling and many different "labels" engendered some of today's very covetable antique beer bottles.
Antique cobalt beer bottles from the late 19th century are some of the most valuable antique beer bottles you can find with some rarities fetching in the range of $500 or more.
After this era, the bottling of beer became more standardize.
