are today the most common package for beer worldwide. Although the bottle now strikes us as the natural package for beer, this was not always so. Historically, beer has not always been served as an effervescent beverage. In antiquity, beer was a flat beverage that was simply served in amphorae, crocks, buckets, leather sacks, or pitchers, sometimes imbibed communally through straws or by passing the drinking vessel around. The Romans invented the art of glass blowing and made simple bottles in which they may have sometimes stored wine. We know, however, that in this era bottles were rare and were not the main storage vessels for wine or, in fact, anything else. The 17th century saw glass making become a major commercial concern, and by the late 1600s glass bottles were common in European upper-class households. In the meantime, beer had moved into oak barrels. As soon as mankind had learned the art of tight, liquid-holding, metal-hooped cooperage in the early Middle Ages, beer could be kept in casks under modest pressure and poured by gravity. See gravity dispense. It took the Industrial Revolution, however, with its enormous advances in material science and fabricating technologies before cheap, pressurized, portable beer containers became possible. Specifically, beer needed the emergence of a glass industry in the late 19th century to become the widely distributed commodity that it is today, with beers made centrally at ever-larger breweries for shipment to entire regions, countries, and even the world. The first automated glass bottle manufacturing machine was invented only around 1900 by an American, Michael Joseph Owens (1859–1923), who first put used it in production in his Owens Bottle Machine Company, formed in 1903 and the forerunner of the current glass-making giant Owens-Illinois Inc.

The difficulty with beer is that it is at its best when it is effervescent, that is, when the container is under pressure. This represents a technological and economic challenge. The technical challenge is that the material must be impermeable to both liquids and gasses, it must be strong, and preferably it should also be lightweight and easy to produce. The challenge is economical because beer, unlike Champagne, for instance, is the common person’s everyday drink. This means that the investment in the packaging must be amortized by the sale of the relatively low-priced—compared with many other alcoholic beverages—content. Most beers, therefore, cannot be put in bottles that are very expensive to produce.

Glass had many practical advantages over the old casks. People could now purchase beer in small amounts and easily travel with it or bring it home to the dinner table. The bottle did have one crucial drawback: it does not block sunlight. Sunlight is the great enemy of any hopped beer’s flavor and shelf life, because it provides the ultraviolet energy for a highly undesirable photochemical reaction, during which the bittering agents iso-alpha acids react with sulfurous fermentation trace elements and dissolved oxygen to produce 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, a compound that gives an unpleasant “skunky” flavor in concentrations as low as 0.4 parts per trillion. See lightstruck. Trained tasters can detect the results of this reaction after as little as 30 seconds of exposure to bright sunlight. The reaction is fastest in clear bottles, which do not impede light at all. It is slightly slower in green bottles, which cannot block the frequency of light that is most responsible for the skunking process. Green bottles, despite their ubiquity, remain poor packages for beer. Brown bottles have optimum (although not perfect) blockage ability, but they, too, can only delay, not prevent, the inevitable effects of light. The beer can, which in the minds of many beer aficionados is often associated with uninspiring mass- produced beers, is ironically often the best packaging, because metal is entirely impermeable to light. See canning.

Because beer is under pressure, the natural optimum shape for a beer container would be a sphere. It is a simple law of physics that, in a round container, every part of the container receives the same amount of radial, outward pressure, which means there is no weak spot for the container to burst. Beyond this requirement, however, there is an almost infinite opportunity for designers to shape the bottle, mostly for marketing reasons. Hand-blown bottles from the 1600s are almost uniformly onion shaped, but today almost all beer bottles are taller than they are wide. They have straight-side bodies and then taper at the top to form a pouring neck. Bottles from the 1800s often have attractive shapes with low, squat shoulders and long, elegant necks, but these broke more easily than modern bottles. Modern beer bottles tend to be straight sided, mostly because automatic labeling machines work most reliably with flat rather than bulgy surfaces. Unless they are cork-stoppered and wire-cage “Champagne-style” bottles for bottle-conditioned beers, they also feature a lip around which a crown cap can be crimped. See crown cap. Alternatively, they may be closed with a wire-bale top, also referred to as a flip-top. Although fairly expensive compared with crown caps, wire bales are now making a comeback, especially in Germany, where recently enacted deposit laws encourage the use of very sturdy, returnable bottles that are cleaned and refilled perhaps 50 times.

Although Europe and most of the world uses and accepts recycled glass beer bottles, the American consumer does not. Recycled bottles, despite the best attempts by brewers and glass manufacturers, will show telltale scuff marks at the shoulder, and the American consumer tends to reject these bottles as unsanitary. Oddly, there seems to be an exception for bottles of mass-market beers when they are sold at bars rather than at retail in shops.

Although the most common shape and size is a long-necked bottle containing 33 cl (12 US oz), many shapes and sizes are used. Belgian brewers in particular have favored their own bottle shapes, with some types of 750-ml bottles having become commonplace both in Belgium and then in the United States, especially for beers that are Belgian inspired. Many American craft brewers put beer in 650.5 ml (22 US oz) bottles that are colloquially known as bombers. For reasons that are unclear, this bottle is very popular in some US markets and virtually anathema in others. In the United Kingdom, the imperial pint (568 ml) remains a popular size, and many shapes are used, some of them handsomely recalling shapes from the late 1800s and early 1900s. And as Italy enters the craft beer scene with typical Italian flair, we are now seeing further stylistic evolutions of the glass bottle.

See also bottle conditioning.