Bottle Collecting, the hobby of collecting older-style beer bottles, began growing in popularity in the United States during the 1970s with the publication of the Kovels’ price list book on antique bottles. The Kovel book together with the National Association Breweriana Advertising in 1972 served as a starting point for many interested in learning more about beer bottle collecting. Today, collectors often focus on a particular type of bottle or bottles from a particular geographical area. Popular brewing styles include porter and ale, brown stout, and various lagers, whereas Philadelphia, New York City, and Brooklyn have provided the greatest variety of producers in the United States.
Bottles entering collections are usually obtained in one of three ways. The first and most sought after bottles are those in “attic” or near-mint condition. Such examples come from old houses or the breweries themselves and show little evidence of actual circulation. Still others are found by scuba divers or along waterways by search or happenstance. Finally, older town dumps have been productive as well. In recent years many 19th-century beer bottles have been discovered by bottle diggers who unearth them in old garbage dumps and long-abandoned urban privy pits.
The Industrial Revolution by the 1830s brought more durable glass beer bottles to the United States in significant numbers. Bottles until the 1860s were typically hand blown into a blank or embossed mold using a hollow tube called a blowpipe or pontil rod. The glassblower would skillfully work the far end of the molten glass before breaking the bottle free of the rod, leaving either a circular “open” or “iron” pontil mark on the base. These are highly prized by many collectors. Mechanization of the process later simplified beer bottles to smooth bases with “blob tops” until the 1904 Owens Automatic Bottling Machine standardized most bottles into “crown tops,” the genesis of the modern beer bottle.