Why are Beer Bottles Mostly Green?

I don’t know if you have noticed that most of the beer bottles we see are green, blue, or even colorless. So why are beer bottles green?

While beer has a very long history, beer in glass bottles has not been around for very long, starting around the mid-19th century. Initially, people even thought that glass was green. Not only beer bottles, but also ink bottles, paste bottles, and even windowpanes were slightly green. 

"This is because it was difficult to remove impurity ions such as ferrous ions in the raw materials when the glass manufacturing process was not very sophisticated at first, so the glass produced was green," said a P.h.D. from the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Later, the glass manufacturing process was advanced, and these impurities could be removed, but the cost was too high to be worth the effort for glass used as a non-precision instrument, and it was found that green wine bottles could delay the taste of beer, so at the end of the 19th century, people specially produced green The tradition of green beer bottles has been preserved as a result. "Later, people would add ferrous oxide and chromium oxide to the glass as dyes to make it look greener," the expert said.

By the 1930s, people stumbled across beer in a brown bottle that didn't taste bad over long periods of time. "This is because the brown bottled beer is better able to avoid the influence of light on the beer." experts said. 

Beer exposed to sunlight can produce a stink. The study found that the culprit in the stink is iso-alpha acid in hops. Under light conditions, the bitter ingredient in hops, oxalone, helps the formation of riboflavin, while the iso-alpha acid in beer reacts with riboflavin to break down into a compound that tastes like a weasel's fart. 

Using a brown bottle or some darker bottles absorbs most of the light and prevents this reaction from happening. So, later on, there were more beers in brown bottles.

However, after World War II, brown bottles were in short supply in Europe for a period of time, forcing some of the more well-known beer brands to revert to using green bottles for their beer. Because of the quality of these brands of beer, green bottle beer became synonymous with high-quality beer for a while. 

Then many brewers followed suit and used green glass bottles. "At this time, with the popularity of refrigerators and the advancement of sealing technology, the use of brown bottles will not bring better quality than the use of other color bottles." The expert said, So green beer bottles flourished again.

The above explains why beer bottles are mostly green. If you plan to buy beer bottles, please contact us.

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