is the colloquial name of a wire-bale bottle closure that was invented by German businessman Nicolai Fritzner in Berlin in 1875. Known in Germany as Bügelverschluss, this closure consists of a pivoting wire spring fastened by a collar that crimps into the bottle’s neck. The spring locks a porcelain cap with a rubber gasket tightly to the bottle opening. Before Fritzner, all beer bottles were closed like Champagne bottles, with corks and a wire or string cage. The new closures not only solved the problem of containing high pressure in beer bottles but also made it easy to reclose them. The flip-top remained the standard beer bottle closure worldwide, until it was replaced by the crown cap. See crown cap. In 1877, Nicolai Fritzner received a German patent for his invention, but he was not fast enough to exploit it internationally because he was beaten to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by an imitator, Karl Hutter, a German immigrant in Brooklyn, New York, who was granted a New World patent in 1893 for a “Hutter porcelain stopper” invention that was not his, but made him rich.