Should brewers focus on pints and 500 ml servings?

Let's get rid of $16+, 16 oz four packs and return to 12 oz six pack format. Anything over $10 for 16 oz four packs is a rip off
The 22oz bomber has died a slow death, let the same fate befall overpriced 16oz four packs.

 

I would be okay with it, I suppose, if they kept the price point the same. But these $15 /4 packs of pilsner.....nope!

That said, my preference would probably be to keep the 12oz format.

I'm okay with the larger format for more drinkable styles, but preference is for high ABV stuff in smaller formats.

 

That's not how returnable/refillable bottles worked. You brought the empties back to the same retailer that sold you the beer, so that you never had to pay the deposit again, just return the same quantity of bottles/cases.

Also, true returnable bottles weren't "recycled" they were cleaned, sterilized and refilled by the brewery. Here's Uncle Joe loading the machine:

Aunt Eunice used to get mad when he came not smelling of stale beer.

 

Bizarre, this is still a very normal thing in Ontario (and other Canadian provinces I would think). There are retailers that take in kegs/cans/bottles/plastics/cardboard cases regardless of where you bought them.

Money exchanges hands at each step. The retailer is happy cause it gets people in the store, the company tasked with the pick up and sorting is happy cause they also get paid, and the brewer is happy cause they get their packaging back (and maybe tax cuts for their “green” business practises?) who knows. In Ontario, the brewer (Brewers Retail) has traditionally been the one with the contract to take in this packaging. I always saw it as a system that worked very well for everyone.

Am I misunderstanding the problem?

 

You are correct. The system can work if it's imposed by the government. It's cheaper to refill bottles IF the return path is fairly short, IF the washing facility is efficient, IF the rate of returned bottles is high, and IF the industry has a standard bottle. Ontario never was out of the reusable bottle business, so the systems were never abandoned. They could do better by going back to the standard Canadian stubby, though.

 

Favored Bottle size? In the 70s we would buy twist-top Ballantine XXX Ale quarts. Great bargain, good beer. We'd put the reseal cap back on to save some for the next day. Later in the 70s I found a store with refillable XXX Tavern Tall quarts (JK called them bumpers?). I had to find a stopper to save the leftovers, but still not a problem.

 

Do you know of other provinces that mandate/use refillable bottles.

My guess is that Ontario has a successful system for implementing refillable bottles since there is the government bureaucracy of the LCBO to 'manage' this system. Does any other Canadian province have an equivalent of a LCBO?

Cheers!

 

Would like to see a chart for 2012–2024, and also a chart for container size. I feel like a lot has changed in just the last decade or two.

I spent several months in New Zealand in the 1980s and I vaguely recall that most houses had several racks of empty bottles usually sitting outside beside/behind the house that were returned for a deposit, was the norm there. I almost want to say they were even picked up by the local government but could be making that part up. Most of these were larger bottles, probably 1 liter (DB brand?), but Steinlager came in green bottles.

 

I'm pretty sure that LCBO sells less beer than the "The Beer Store". "The Beer Store" is owned by a consortium of brewers. That's a bit like the PA distributors, with the exception that it doesn't have access to all brewery brands. LCBO sells different brands from "The Beer Store".

 

The LCBO still sets the rules for all movement and sale of alcohol though. I worked in the system for years and I have to admit I dont even know enough about it to answer some of these messages. TBS has the contract for the returns. That may not last forever.

I take an optimistic view of your ability to organize a similar program, when some of your little states have nearly the same population as our entire country. But you’re right, it takes a lot of cooperation. Its difficult to convince a population who’ve spent generations doing A to instead do B.

Also, I don’t like stubbies. No reason. Just don’t like ‘em

 

Yeah, the "screw-off / screw-back-on" were the nicest types of quarts. (Some brewers even - briefly - used them for other size bottles, like Schaefer and Lone Star - before the universal acceptance of "twist-off" crown for T/A bottles).

Technically called "Roll On" closures (not to be confused with deodorant), after the method used to apply them. They had no threads until a mechanism came along and rolled the soft aluminum against the threaded bottle neck to create the thread on the cap.

I was just following the brewery's terminology. But, yeah, they took crowns.

 

By the time I saw the reusable Ballantine quarts in the late 70s, they were in the tall green bottles, but weren't sporting neck labels of any kind. I think Falstaff's early 70s book about beer may have called them "tavern tall"?

 

Exactly, but who is to say that it’s going to work that way if/when returnable bottles are implemented again?

The original returnable bottle process was not that much different from what Sparkletts or Alhambra do when they deliver the five gallon bottles to your home or office. Except of course we’d be dealing with fragile glass instead of thick plastic and beer delivery isn’t too common.

I hope they just leave things how they are right now, I love my wasteful single use products!

 

I like 12 ounce bottles, cans only if that is all available.

 

This is still my favorite a) beer and b) package. Wish, someday, they’d at least bring the beer back.

 

Yeah, the "Bumper" terminology seems to originate from a slang term (maybe via the UK) for any larger bottle of any product. Ballantine used it most commonly but a few other brewers referred to their quarts as "bumper bottles", as did at least one soda pop bottler (Old Colony) and even in a newspaper reference to a change in PA's infamous case law:


The throw-away quart bottle used by Falstaff for Ballantine XXX Ale I remember the best was a sort of oversized "Mod" bottle (the common 12 oz. used by many US breweries at the time) with a standard twist-off crown and looked something like this (not an actual photo of the bottle but an incredible re-creation):

Yeah, never found that terminology from Falstaff's Complete Beer Book anywhere else. The book was listing the weight of cases of beer in various packages, and noted the difference between "tavern tall" quarts and steinie quarts (1 lb. lighter, for the record ).

In some regions, true refillable/returnable 12 oz. "export", "long/tall neck" bottles were called "Bar Bottles" (because they were typically sold at bars rather than off-premise retailers in many states), so I've always taken the tavern tall reference was related to that. Although not many bars sold quarts for on-premise consumption*

* Quarts first became popular during WWII and brewers promoted them as using less metal for the war effort (1 crown vs 3, as noted in the Grossvator ad above). Just read a story about Massachusetts repealing a law during the War that prohibited a bar from selling a customer more than 1 "drink" at a time, to allow people to order a quart of beer...

 

In the Northwest in the 60s, the 12 oz tall returnable export was very rare (possibly only the national brands and only in bars). The local brand bottles were generally 11 oz, whether refillable or not. When the bottle law was imposed, the 12 returnable export arrived. Blitz had a campaign promoting its "new" 12 oz refillable as "Big Blitz". Here's a poster connected with that:
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/blitz-weinhard-co-portland-vintage-250736760

 

I used to drink in a bar many years ago that served tavern talls. When the bartender took the bottle from the bar he put it into a metal corrugated chute that went to the basement. I assumed they were sorted there for return to the distributor. Jeez I loved the sound of those bottles zipping down the chute and landing on the other bottles! Also a quart of Iron City was 50 cents to go.

 

That is a merger of various graphs from the US Brewers Association's Brewers Almanac from several different annual editions - the USBA, aka "the big brewers" organization, now known as The Beer Institute after reorganization (Miller and AB were still feuding in the 80s).

* most up-to-date = 2018? Hey, I ain't a due paying member. Complain to them.

Given that true returnable/refillable bottles are still all but non-existent**, they no longer note that. Sadly, in general, the amount of information the BI now release is a mere fraction of what they once published in the Brewers Almanacs.

**Straub still uses them and not sure about that attempt to revive them by a group of PNW brewers but it can't add up to much.

I always thought it was funny how the enlightened "craft" brewers would gladly sell you a bottle (growler) for re-use and then make you clean it yourself, where previously the big bad macro industry would loan you one if you put down a refundable 2¢-5¢ and they would sterilize them for you.

 

As far as I know it's only in Oregon and at least one brewery (Gigantic) sends their beer out into distribution in them despite consumers like me having no way to return them.

A couple years ago they were scheming on building their own plant for washing the returned bottles in Portland. If that's still in planning then they're sending the bottles to Montana, which always makes me wonder what that Montana facility is for outside the Oregon reusable program. Is there some other reusable beverage situation in that region?