Vintage Beer Bottle Labels

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Pre-Prohibition beer-bottle labels tended to be simple, using few colors and simply naming the brewer and its location. Some of the most collectible pre-Prohibition labels are die-cuts, which were cut specifically to accentuate the shape of a...
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Pre-Prohibition beer-bottle labels tended to be simple, using few colors and simply naming the brewer and its location. Some of the most collectible pre-Prohibition labels are die-cuts, which were cut specifically to accentuate the shape of a logo or the letters in a brand name. Post-Prohibition labels became more uniformly geometrical, but within the label’s borders they were often more creative, featuring mascots (such as the Hamm's bear) and specific names for different brands from the same brewer. In general, there are two kinds of collectible vintage beer labels—those that have been soaked off the bottles to which they were affixed, and unused labels that have never seen a drop of glue. On the one hand, this means that one is more likely to find an older label in pristine condition than a modern one, since beer bottling was much less of an exact science than it is today. On the other hand, many early beer bottles were embossed rather than papered with a label, which means that many of the surviving labels from the pre-Prohibition era are for seasonal beers such as “Holiday” brews in the winter and “bock” beers in the spring. Of the pre-Prohibition labels, those produced by the George Ehret’s brewery of New York City are highly prized by breweriana collectors, in part because his Hell Gate Brewery was purchased in the 1930s by Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert but also because many of Ehret’s early labels are so charming—the one advertising Franziskaner Beer featured a rotund friar raising a glass. Equally engaging, if for different reasons, is the label for Buzz Special Beer, which was brewed by the Deppen Manufacturing Company of Reading Pennsylvania, and had a hive of buzzing bees in the label’s upper-left corner, lest the customer got the wrong idea of what the brewing was encouraging.

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