Do Bar Bottles Still Exist?

Huber out of Monroe, WI still packages some of their beers this way -- if you can get past their "house" flavor.

 

I only remember that with soda pop. Whenever I went over to my grandparents house they would have soda pop that they'd go someplace and have the bottles refilled. Haven't seen that in years but then again I don't go looking for it either. The beer I'd guess tasted better because it was probably unpasteurized similar to keg beer (or craft beer today). I remember always thinking the beer tasted better on draft but now there's not much difference.

I'd also guess the laws make it hard for most places to package beer like that today. I know liquor licenses in my state generally prohibit a bar from selling beer to go unless they are a brewery as well. Sorry I don't have much to help you with but your post just reminded me of those times with my grandparents in the 70's.

 

I saw this as recently as 1995, when I was homebrewing, a bartender friend of mine used to save them for me.

 

I remember the thick brown glass Bud long necks that were deposit, and the waxed, double wall cardboard cases like you describe were deposit also. I know my friends and I always called them Bud Exports but I have no idea what they really were called

 

I vaguely recall returnables and so on. But, glass prices and a lot of other things happened in the thirty years since that was a reality.

 

I think you just described a returnable case of beer. I remember them because I'm an old fart. You youngsters here on BA won't want to believe this, but I used to get a case of Schmidts of Philadelphia when I lived in the Cleveland area..... $3 plus a dollar deposit the first time for the case and bottles. Those were the days, my friend. (1970s)

 

Yep, w an empty case and $3.10 I used to buy a case of Rhinelander back in the 70's.

 

Stegmaier out of Wilkes-Barre had these back when I was in college. Maybe around 2010?

 

Yuengling bottled this way , I always used them for bottling homebrew, about $8 a case. Last time I bought any was 1999, that's the year I moved and remember taking all my cases back for my deposit. When I got to my current home there were no returnable bottles.

Enjoy

 

The true "returnable/refillable" bottle aka "deposit" "export" "bar bottle", etc., is pretty much dead. Once the large brewers dropped them for various reasons (expensive to transport back to the brewery and to clean/sterilize, energy and water costs, foreign objects in bottles, people objecting to the worn look of some bottles, etc) in the 1990s, it generally became too expensive for the smaller brewers to continue with them. The Beer Institute's Brewers Almanac "National Packaging Mix" had refillable bottles at 12% in 1981, 5% in 1991, 2% in 2001 and 0.0% by 2007.

Last brewer I recall using them was Straub in western PA., and they were forced to pay the bottle manufacturer for new molds.
Straub Brewery’s 16-ounce returnable “pounder” bottle wins environmental leadership award

Of course, the "craft" brewers also have a re-usable bottle - the growler. But you have to buy it and are responsible for cleaning it...

Pretty sure both Yuengling and The Lion dropped their deposit/refillable bottle within the last 10 years or so.

EDIT - there's even video of the last of The Lion's:


Before the "Craft Era" just about every brewer used refillable bottles for at least part of the production.

 

Yeah, we called them the same thing. Probably bought them at the same place, too .

My buddy John was convinced they tasted better, and I could buy that to a certain extent but I think it was just a freshness issue. Maybe they were also unpasteurized?

On one of these threads I'm sure there's a @jesskidden dissertation on returnable bottles.

 

Sounds about right. I said 2010 in my post and the video is from 2009. I turned 21 in 2009, so makes sense. I remember buying the returnable bottles and then not seeing them again.

 

We used to buy cases of Genesee product this way. I forget the price (maybe $12-15ish, mid-89's) for 24x16 bottles in the sturdy cardboard case.

 

That's one of the Huber brands still available in returnable cases, IIRC. Sorry, didn't look at the price the last time I saw them.

 

Refillable bottles were tunnel pasteurized just as cans and throw-away bottles were. Until the common usage of the "micro-filtering (millipour)/sterile-fill" process, circa the late-50s-mid-60s (via Coors and a number of well-known brewers who offered so-called "real draft" beer in cans and bottles) US brewers almost universally pasteurized packaged beers OR, in the case of the so-called "picnic bottles" [1/2 gallon] the labels would read "NOT PASTEURIZED" or "KEPT REFRIGERATED" or both, like this one:


Here's a pic (via my old Nikon) I took circa 1975 after a beer run that I was going to post in the Post a picture of your Latest Beer Haul thread that day---- until someone reminded me that the BeerAdvocate website wouldn't go online for a few more decades...

 

@rlhead35 I thought you might enjoy a visual of what you are discussing. You are referring to a case of returnable bottles. Below is two photographs I took of the Bud Light returnable case that I have in my basement. The bottles inside that case are homebrewed Belgian Dubbels.

Cheers!

 

“No deposit, no return” was a big marketing slogan.

 

Dude, you were getting ripped off! Look what they were selling it for south of you in PA (outside of Pittsburgh)!

Back when beer was still cheap in PA, likely because they had more local breweries than any other state. (A quick search of NY papers show a typical sale price of Genesee "pounders" was closer to $10/cs at the time).

Yeah, and you paid for the "convenience" - as noted above, the "NR" throw-away bottles cost over a buck more per case AND were only 12 oz'ers, to boot!