Bottles from bars?
I live in Michigan and our bottles are 10 cent returnables. I went to my local liquor store and buy their returned bottles for 10 cents. That saves me about 30 cents per bottle on buying a case from my LHBS. I also justify buying myself better beer because I can use the bottles over again. I have been switching to 22 oz. bottles which are 60 cents per bottle in a case. That means the 22 oz. Sam Adams Boston Lager costs me about $1.79 with deposit included because I take the 60 cents off for what having the bottle saves me. Yeah, mental gymnastics trying to justify drinking what I want to drink, but it makes me feel better. I really like those bottles because after you soak them for about 10 minutes the label slides right off and I have to bottle less bottles per batch.
We don't have glass deposits here. I checked with the local bar, they said I was more than welcome to dumpster dive but they wouldn't set any bottles aside. I even offered to meet the cleaning crew when they dumped the trash, but apparantly they toss the bottles in with the general trash. I don't particularly feel like sifting through bags of soggy garbage, so I may end up just buying 22 oz bottles from the LHBS.
Most states don't have a bottle bill. People just throw them away. I wouldn't dumpster dive either. I definitely recommend 22 oz bottles. They probably cost a little more, but you can reuse them, and that will just about cut your bottling time in half until you start kegging.
I would just buy a few 12pks or cases of beer, Sam Adams or anything with the right type of bottle, and enjoy emptying them with some friends, If you going to buy bottles at $9 a 12pk or so you might as well pay a few bucks more and get them with beer in them.
MariaAZ,
I live in Canada and a good number of empties make their way back into the brewery production line. Just before NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) came to Canada, the industries looked long and hard at ways to become more competitive. Before NAFTA, legislation required that beer had to be produced in the province it was to be sold, partyy as a way of ensuring that breweries were spread around the country. In a country as large as Canada, that made a certain amount of sense.
Since that time, most of the larger Canadian breweries have standardized to one type of long neck bottle (called a T-bottle). This bottle is used by Molson's, Labatt's, Big Rock, etc and this means that local bottle returns allow a very large number of bottles to be reused in manufacturing by any domestic breweries. Sorry for being so longwinded, but without this bottle standardization I doubt it would have been feasible to do so. These T-bottles are twist offs and no damn good for homebrewing, unfortunately.
I worked at a brewing factory and the above described bottles were loaded to an assembly line in all their most disgusting glory. Cigarette butts, ashes, "oysters", and any gross stuff remained in the bottle. A huge machine called a soaker had a special contraption that inverted the bottles and placed them into a special moving tray that ran the entire length of the soaker. The bottles were continuously injected with hot water and liquic caustic by numerous nozzles, kind like ones at your local carwash. Towards the end of the soaker the machine focused on simple rinsing. The whole set-up was amazing and anything that failed to be cleaned after this process was kicked off the assembly line by a special scanning machine. Dirty bottles would be crushed and sent to recycling (anything that didn't get clean after one pass through the soaker wasn't going to ever be clean anyways). The bottles coming out of the soaker and passing the screening machine were sterile and mere seconds away from the filling and capping machines. The whole process was pretty amazing.
At home, I soak my grubbies in the sink and use a bottle brush to scrub any gunk from the bottles. I add some dish soap to help matters and then rinse them until there is no visible traces of soap. This is a "pre-clean." On bottling day, the same bottles run through my dishwasher. The dishwasher has no regular dishes. Just the bottles needed for that day. I run the dishwasher and do not use any dishwasher detergent but do add about 1/2 cup liquid bleach. I time the washing cycle so that the bottles have just completed the hot drying cycle when I bottle. This process comes pretty close to copying the process I witnessed in the brewery I used to work at. My favorite bottles are the Red Stripe stubby bottle because I can fit a batch of 60 through my dishwasher in one go.
I hadn't realized how uncommon reusing the bottles seems to be. Some of them go in the trash! That's awful. My brewery manager said that the average glass bottle managed to be reused 14 times and that it was more cost-effective and ecologically friendly than crushing and reforming the bottles. He claimed that it was even cheaper than aluminum cans even through the weight of glass has implications for transport and so forth. I'd be curious to know if the economics have changed much since that time. It goes without saying that crushing bottles makes sense for any non-domestic bottles.
I live in Canada too and I used the refillable quart bottles whenever I could.
You've probably thought of this Maria, but would there be another establishment like maybe a restaurant you could try?
I thought if they didn't have as much bottle traffic, maybe setting them aside would be less of a hassle for them.
It's just a thought. Good luck.
Thanks for the brewery procedure description! I suppose nowadays the breweries just send the returns to the crusher for remanufacturing, but it's good to know how bottles are handled when they are reused instead.
Funny about the mention of a restaurant... I stopped by a local German restaurant that has a nice biergarten. The owner was more than gracious, and although most of their beer is draft, she said they would be more than happy to save the bottles and call me when they have a few set aside. I'm going to check around with a couple other restaurants and see if I can work out the same thing. Hopefully I'll be sanitizing bottles soon!
Good thought on the german restaurant, that just reminded me that one of my local restaurants sells "shwartzbier" in the 16 oz flippers....I've always thought about asking the owner if he'd save me those empties for a quarter per bottle or something like that...
Not sure if still helpful or not,but regarding commercial beers that have good bottles for re use Smithwick's Ale (made by Guinness) have nice heavy bottles very similar to those Ive bought at the brew store. Although the beer isn't as good as home brew it's reasonably priced and not bad tasting.
I have to agree with these guys.
RM gets them new, 22oz. I think he pays $10 for a case of 15(I think it's 15)
They're thick enough to use 3 or 4 times. Worth the investment.
I collect bottles. (guilty)
Most pint bottles are good for a batch. Maybe two.
Got a case of kapuziner for Christmas. (thanks dude)
Those are good pint bottles. They will be reused.
When your looking to reuse, I like to pick the ones that are not hard to clean.
If I can soak them in water and the label almost comes off by itself, I'll reuse it.
Found out tonight Sam Adams labels fall apart in the sink. Just use a light scratch pad for the glue.
I don't like to see my beer in a bud bottle or something.
I don't know if I would get them from a bar.
Make sure when you buy beer it isn't twist off caps, that might help some.
I just use them for bottling up beer kits that I brew.
The BKBStout is going into new 22oz. bottles.
Every batch doesn't need to be in a new bottle.
It does help to have good bottles in the system. You'll be glad you did.