Howdy, Chris here.

I remember when I was growing up, going to the supermarket with my dad, carrying in a case or two of empty 16-ounce beer bottles (whatever was the cheapest), getting the deposit back, and picking up a case or two of beer. The bottles were tall, thick and heavy and came in a nice reusable cardboard box. I also remember sometimes that those boxes ended up in the study, converted to filing cabinets by my mother. Ah, one more thing from the good old days, gone.

Rhinelander Beer Case

I recently found an article that surprised me — there are still a few breweries in the US that use returnable bottles. Most have gone to one-use recyclable bottles instead. But the breweries that are still using returnable bottles are running into a huge problem — not enough people are returning them. One Pennsylvania brewery, Straub, bought 150,000 cases of returnable bottles five years ago, but most of them are gone — broken, thrown away, dumped in the recycle bin, used for homebrew, or just stashed in a corner by people who aren’t used to returning bottles any more. A recent bottling run had to be cut short because they didn’t have enough bottles to fill.

Returnable bottles have to be carefully washed, inspected for chips and cracks, and sanitized before refilling. And people, especially drunk people, often put nasty things inside bottles — motor oil, boogers, condoms, cigarette butts, used syringes, chewing tobacco spit, you name it. Cleaning them is a major pain in the butt for a brewery, but a shrinking number of breweries still see the value in it. “It’s not that we’re totally into ’green,’ but we think it’s the right thing to do,” said Dan Straub, great-grandson of company founder Peter Straub and the brewery’s semiretired vice president. “Our philosophy is, ‘Why recycle when you can reuse?’”

Basically having returnable long-neck 12-ounce and 16-ounce bottles is a company tradition: “It’s our customers. Their fathers drank it, their grandfathers drank it. It’s not just a business decision.” But without bottles to refill, the company is thinking of discontinuing returnable bottles by the end of this year. It’s just not practical any more.

Returnable Bottles being Loaded in the Bottle Washer at Straub Brewery in PA

In Japan until just recently, a large amount of beer was sold in big thick “Oh-bin” or big bottles — I don’t remember exactly, but I think they were 633 ml (there were also 500 ml and 350 ml returnable bottles). But in the past ten years or so, the number of bottles being sold has decreased and the number of cans has skyrocketed. Even though many pubs and restaurants still sell beer in returnable bottles (although these days it’s more often the 500-ml size), it’s only a matter of time until the big Japanese breweries stop selling beer in returnable bottles. In a way, it’s kind of sad.

At Baird Brewing we don’t reuse bottles for several practical reasons — we don’t have the man-power to clean the bottles, we don’t have the equipment to clean and inspect them properly, we don’t have the storage space to keep them until bottling day. But in Japan, recycling is well established, and we’re sure our bottles are being sent to the right place rather than being dumped in the park somewhere. But as a former homebrewer, I hope that many of them are being refilled with delicious fresh homebrew by the secret (and not-so-secret) homebrewers of Japan — which in a way does make them returnable.

Cheers,

Chris

Reference: Pa. brewery wants to reuse, not recycle