Vintage Beer Bottles Discovered on Milwaukee Development Site

Sounds like it's time to page @jesskidden

 

Call me when the guy gets a bucket of water and a brush and cleans them off better.

This is nonsense. Gablinger's Beer (no "Diet" *) was created by Joe Owades for his employer, Brooklyn's Rheingold Breweries, brewer of Rheingold Extra Dry Beer. Owades would later claim he "gave" the recipe and brewing method to the brewmaster at Peter Hand/Meister Brau because the two brewers didn't compete but Meister Brau licensed their light beer brand to P. Ballantine & Sons in Newark, NJ, so the two beers were marketed for a time in the same region.

* You know, numerous websites and recent articles make this mistake (and many other similar ones)- probably because the amount of research that goes into some of these web articles is a 30 second Google and a quick "copy/paste". so they all keep repeating the same errors based on faulty sources.

 

Maybe so <OWW!

 

Cool post - thanks for sharing!

 

I love these stories. I have been a collector and finder of things my entire life. Native American artifacts have always been everywhere if you look carefully. I find spear points all of the time and have done so since I was very young. I've always thought old dump piles behind or nearby long uninhabitable homes to be a treasure trove. Old beer bottles, dairy bottles, coins, and cans of all types, including many of the cone-capped ones that always intrigued me. Patent medicine bottles are fun finds. I found a coffee can full of silver dollars once in an old dump deep in the woods near my childhood home. I still have them. I found a Revolutionary War powder horn in my neighborhood buried in a berm likely built at the time of The Battle of Guilford Courthouse (1781). Honestly these things are everywhere and I've always had a knack at finding "stuff". My house is full of these things. It is fun.

 

The best part of that article is that the photos look just like someone from BA just left the bottle shop. Only thing better would be if they had been crotch shots in front of the wheel.

 

German beers, included some exported to the US were labeled "Diat Beer" but I'd guess the BATF (at the time) wouldn't have allowed it in the US. Those early Lights weren't even initially able to mention calories. The early ads noted only "No Carbohydrates"

 

It is amazing how quickly things get forgotten and lost in history. About 35 years ago I was working with a friend in Winston-Salem razing an old shed . On an old hardwood shelf (the place was sturdy) laying on the ground I found an old brass room key. It is solid brass, well burnished, and the shape of a six pointed star. I love it. It reads:
Wiley Hotel
8
Raleigh, N.C.
I've looked up the Wiley, but that really is another story. Cheers.

 

Awful damn lot of Chicago beer being found in Milwaukee.

 

Don't ya remember how hard it was to return some bottles for the deposit?

"Uh, yeah I can't accept this one, we don't even sell brand."
"But I bought it here!"
"No ya didn't..."
"C'mon, man, I'm out 2¢! Money don't grow on trees!"

The local Milwaukee brewers' bottles were all accepted by the retailers, sent back to the brewery and refilled. All those out-of-town bottles were turned down, over and over, so the guy got tired of carrying them around and threw them into that big hole out back...

 

Jeez, an early example of "buy local". I've sold German beers that have been "returned" many times. Often the bottles were worn and notably marked. I had some retailers that tried to return these full returnables because "they were damaged and unpresentable". I would roll my eyes.

 

Yeah, you don't see those old white wear rings around the top and bottom of the main section of the bottle too much on imports anymore - I always thought that some brewers separated the worn ones on their last legs and bottled/labeled them for the US market for one last trip since they weren't coming back. More economical that throwing them out.

Yuengling did something similar when they dropped returnables, bottling Yuengling Light Lager IIRC in the last of their returnables and even packing them in the returnable shells that were marked for their once flagship Yuengling Premium. I asked the retailer if they were charging a deposit and taking them back. Nope, sold as is and "no deposit, no return". It would have been a score for homebrewers. Heck, I hadn't homebrewed in 15 years but I toyed with buying a case but it was their light beer so I passed.

Ha, I always like some people (I recall it happening here on the BA forums) who were disgusted by the thought of drinking beer out of a bottle that had been used numerous times previously. (Maybe some, uh, "undesirable" person once even had their mouth right on the bottle's mouth!)

"Uh, ever been to a restaurant (the kind with china plates and metal silverware, not the ones with food served in cardboard and styrofoam with plastic sporks). That fork? That spoon? Someone once had both of them in their mouth. That glass or coffee cup? Unknown lips - right on 'em!"

 

200 mile round trip? Just for beer? In 1902?

I shouldn't laugh, my cousin found early 20th century beer bottles from a Northern Illinois brewery at the bottom of a lake in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Maybe Illinois beer was just better back then?

(ducks the rain of New Glarus bottles)

 

My all-time favorite restaurant was Uglesich's in the industrial area behind the Superdome. They served lunch in cardboard beer case trays lined with wax paper and the best fried oysters I've ever had. Never had anything else there. They were Yugoslav fishermen for generations and had FRESH seafood.

 

Never heard of his Peter Hand brewery..:

 

There were essentially two separate Peter Hand brewing companies. The first, founded in the 1890 by Civil War veteran, German-born Peter Hand, changed its name to Meister Brau, its primary product, in 1967.

Then when Fred Huber and other investors bought the closed former Meister Brau brewery in 1973 after the company sold most of its brands to Miller, they named their new company Peter Hand. Their primary brand was Old Chicago but they did eventually brew a Peter Hand Extra Light Beer.