Posted 12 years ago
eaglepanda
(1 item)
Embossed Beer Bottle
Pittsburgh Brewing Co. Pittsburgh, Pa. U.S.A.
B 91 on the bottom
2 seams on the sides of the bottle
Has a cork inside it!
Anyone know the age and value
It has some minor chips in the embossed letters
Do the two seams go all the way to the very top of the bottle?
I do not do value, but I can date it for you.
Looks like the seams end near the neck and there are fine machine like grooves around the neck.
Lets see what we know here.
"On February 3, 1899, the Pittsburgh Dispatch reported that 12 local brewing firms applied to transfer their license to the trust known as Pittsburgh Brewing Company."
Your bottle has a Crown Cork Seal, invented by William Painter in 1892(I doubt the cork inside goes with the bottle.)
Your bottle is a BIMAL(Blown In Mold, Applied Lip. Also called two-piece mold.)
The grooves you see around the top are not machine marks. They are tooling marks made when the glass person applied a glob of glass to the top of the bottle and using a tool called a "finishing tool", spun the bottle and the closure was formed.
"The terminal end of the side seams on a tooled bottle will often bend slightly in the direction that the finishing tool was rotated. (NOTE: Empirical observations of several hundred tooled finish bottles indicates that where the rotation can be determined (almost half of the bottles were inconclusive) about 75% have counterclockwise tooling marks and 25% clockwise. This could be a function of either the gaffer being left or right handed or of how the workbench mounted finishing devices rotated under hand or foot power"
On August 2, 1904, Owens patented a machine that could automatically manufacture glass bottles. This machine could produce four bottles per second.
With all that said, your bottle was most likely manufactured between 1899 and 1904.
hope this helps
Thank you ! Very interesting................
Back in 1998 we were remodeling our 100 + year old house, I was digging out the hillside for a swimming pool when I found this. I can only imagine the person who drank this beer may have worked at the Isabella furnace mill in Etna 3 miles north of Pittsburgh PA. The mills could be seen from the hill the house is located on . Maybe he drank half the beer and put the cork in it? Very cool...........