Why Are Beer Bottles Mostly Green

I wonder if you have noticed that most of the beer bottles we see are green. Although there are brown, blue or even colorless, most of the beer bottles are green. So why are beer bottles green?

Using green beer bottles is traditional

Although beer has a very long history, the time it takes to put beer in glass bottles is not too long, starting about the middle of the 19th century.

At first, people even thought that glass was green. At that time, not only beer bottles, ink bottles, and even the window glass were slightly green. This is because it is difficult to remove impurity ions in the raw materials when the glass manufacturing process is not very exquisite at first, so the glass produced is green.

Later, the glass manufacturing technology was advanced to remove these impurities, but the cost was too high to be worth the effort for the glass used as a non-precision instrument, and it was discovered that green wine bottles could delay the taste of beer, so at the end of the 19th century, people specialized in green production. The tradition of green beer bottles has been preserved.

Take back the country from the brown bottle

In the 1930s, people accidentally discovered that the taste of beer in brown bottles did not deteriorate after being left for a long time.

Under light conditions, the bitter component of hops, oxalin, will help the formation of riboflavin, and the iso-alpha acid in beer will react with riboflavin under light to decompose into a compound, which tastes like the fart of a weasel .

The use of brown bottles or some dark bottles can absorb most of the light, which can hinder the occurrence of this reaction. Therefore, more beer in brown bottles was used later.

However, after World War II, there was a period of short supply of brown bottles in Europe, which forced some famous beer brands to re-use green bottles for beer. Because these brands of beer are of good quality, green bottle beer has become synonymous with high-quality beer for a while. Immediately afterwards, many beer manufacturers followed up and used green bottles. So green beer bottles are flourishing again.