My bottle return story

JK, how well did that container retain carbonation? If you just got it filled up could you consume it a week later?

Cheers!

 

No, it was a true "growler" - a way to get fresh draught beer home to be consumed immediately (not a substitute for true bottling/canning), like the original growlers - open-topped tin buckets, china pitchers or cardboard containers with slip-on lids.

Newman's unit did hold carbonation, but not very well - I remember seeing the ones in retailers look like they were about to explode the cardboard outer shell straining to hold the thing intact. "Trouble is, the ale does not travel well in plastic jugs", said one article. OTOH, they were cheap - the 1 gallon size was $7 with a $5 refill at the brewery (1985) - at a time when most of the early "microbrews" were typically about a buck a bottle.

Jim Koch in Ogle's Ambitious Brew talks about the poor shelf-life of Newman's beers while neglecting to mention that they weren't bottled or packaged by other conventional methods. (Newman later did have his beers contract-brewed and bottled by a few other old-line breweries - like C. Schmidt & Sons, Hibernia [ex-Walters] and Matt's.)

 

My brother in law is a soda ash executive and really doesn't care about recycling of any kind.

 

I was just reading some plausible sources which said that recycling aluminum only takes 5% of the energy of refining ore. Also interesting facts about aluminum is that it was more expensive than gold before the development of the electrical methods of refinement in the mid 1800s. Napoleon used cutlery made of aluminum (because of its opulent rarity). Also the Washington Monument was capped with 100 ounces of pure aluminum in 1884 (again because of its extravagant rarity and value at that time).

 

I worded it poorly, but intended to convey that the levels of oxygen in a bottle as a result of ingress after packaging will be influenced by the quality of the seal, the type of seal (pry-off vs twist-off crown), oxygen scavenging caps, etc.

 

Haven't heard of any issues here. & yeah I have heard of the glass being used as clean fill. Last I knew, 92%? of the waste stream in Broome Co. is recycled. In the late 70s/early 80s, the landfill was headed towards closure , and all of the options for replacement were bad. That led to a crash course in recycling. That family that had their garbage put in the Smithsonian(Total of 1 shopping bag-full, in 3 years) ? He ended up a county legislator, and became the chairman of the Solid Waste Committee .

 

I remember one of my friends - a 'true libertarian', stating "Recycling doesn't work.....there's no money in it."

 

Smaller breweries typically use the plastic wrapped cans. Why? The minimum order for printed/painted cans is a really big number, which has a set up cost andabig purchase cost. The cans then have to be warehoused between batches of beer being canned, which costs money.

Economics once again.

 

Our county, Ulster, had to close and cap all our landfills almost twenty years ago. This made us extemely green, it was a matter of economics. Once you have to pay tipping to haul to landfills in other parts of the state you get that way. Proud to say I was part of my county's crash course in recycling. Ulster recently got recognition for our green successes with compost and solar. How we deal with bottles, including beer bottles, definitely a part of that commitment.

 

Whenever I see one of those articles that compares the manufacturing and recycling of beer cans vs bottles, I always wonder to myself: "Why aren't they bringing into the equation the plastic that's inside the can, the plastic that's outside the can, and the plastic that's holding the cans together?" Granted, there are plenty of printed cans that come packaged in cardboard, but all of them have plastic on the inside even if incredibly thin.

 

I absolutely despise the redemption stuff. I always wait too long and have too much. The machines are dirty, sticky, and don't work very well. I buy 95% of my stuff at the very store I return this to, but the machines "don't accept this brand." Then you have to bring them inside to customer service, and tell them how many cans/bottles you have. Last time I had a failure rate of over 50%

Every time I do this, I swear I'm just going to write off the cost of part of the beer cost, but I can't bring myself to do it.

 

I've always assumed that the thin coating of epoxy just burns off in the melting of the aluminum cans (and then enters the atmosphere ).

I've been in steel mills that made rebar out of recycled steel material just dumped into the giant furnace with not a lot of attention paid to the items being absolutely "pure" (rust, paint, maybe some small pieces of plastic, aluminum or other types of metal items attached, etc).

As for those cans that are either plastic-shrink-wrapped or have the plasticized "sticker" labels (ditto for those beer bottles so labeled to look like the old painted label of Rolling Rock and similar bottles), I find myself often peeling those off just out of habit (like sitting a bar and absent-mindedly peeling the damp labels off of the old returnables), so I save the recycling plant the trouble. And, as for the plastic ones, the way I read the PLASTIC FILM RECYCLING website, they take most any sort of plastic wrapping/packaging, so I stick the labels in the "plastic bag" bag and take it back to the grocery store.

 

I think the obvious answer to this issue is brewers should be required to run direct pipelines into each consumers home so they can have access to draft beer whenever they want it without the need to dispose of beer packaging. #HouseofWortship2020.

 

They already did that ....well, "proposed it", anyway.

 

Is that the full extent of the proposal? Was there any mention of how every two weeks the beer pipes and faucets would be cleaned out using chemical cleaner?

Cheers!

 

All of this talk of recycling and odd inventions, it reminds me of the rectangular Heineken bottles that were used to build houses and walls:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-heineken-bottles-were-square-62138490/

 

So next time you see a guy passed out in the street surrounded by beer bottles, remember, he isn't a drunk, he's working on his house.

 

Do you guys not have bottle return shops?

There are a lot of them around me, either bring boxes full of empties or pour them on the counter and the attendant counts them for you. Cash in hand normally in less than 5 minutes and no BS feeding one at a time into someone else's sticky machine.

 

We don't in Iowa. There used to be some around, but they have almost all closed down that I'm aware of. IIRC, they only get a penny per can, so there's not tons of money to be made in it.