Description
1870s Olive Green 8in Ale Beer Soda Apollinaris Tooled Blob Top Bottle
This is a bottle from an estate collection that has been in storage since 1966. Please see our other listings for many other bottles.
Bottle Size: 7.875″ x 2.25″ x 2.25″
Apollinaris Style: The bottle is an apollinaris style bottle that was commonly used between the 1880s and 1910s (mouth-blown) and 1910s and likely 1930s (machine-made). The pictured bottle was produced in a turn-mold, has a short tooled blob finish, a slightly indented base, relatively heavy thick walled glass and from the context of what other items it was found with (tooled finish beer bottles with some early wide-mouth machine-made items) most likely dates from about 1900-1910. This style was commonly called the apollinaris by bottle makers during the noted era. Google the actual catalog page from the Illinois Glass Company’s 1906 catalog showing several sizes and types of apollinaris bottle (IGCo. 1906). This shape has much in common with the typical champagne bottle of the same era except that a champagne virtually always has much deeper kick-up base, a champagne style “banded” finish, and is usually a bit proportionally wider in the body.
Apollinaris is the name of a famous spring in Germany which was first bottled in 1852 though at that time it was most likely in tall, relatively narrow handled earthenware jugs which were commonly used for other German mineral waters. It was later (probably by the 1870s) also bottled in the distinctive type bottle shape shown, which is usually olive green in color. Apollinaris water continues to be sold worldwide today (Schulz 1980; Apollinaris-Schweppes. The name apollinaris stuck as the name of this style with bottle makers and users most likely to capture a bit of the cachet of the famous European waters – a not uncommon goal at that time in the U.S. Click Cook’s Mineral Water to see a labeled apollinaris style bottle that was used for a California mineral water and which also dates from the early 20th century most likely. These bottles were typically made with relatively heavy glass indicating use with carbonated mineral water (Lohmann 1972).Finishes on apollinaris bottles were typically a short blob from the early 1880s to the early 1900s when the crown cap began its climb to domination on all beverage bottles including this style by the 1910s. However, blob finishes with swing (“Lightning”) type closures were used at least as late as 1920 on machine-made bottles (IGCo. 1920). Though primarily used for mineral water, this type bottle was also used for lager beer from the early 1870s to at least the mid-1880s and apparently particularly by the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association (Wilson 1981; Lockhart 2007). These earlier “apollinaris” type bottles were most likely blown in a two-piece mold (though might have been occasionally turn-molded) with true applied finishes. This style was also used for other products on occasion. California Brandy is an example. Use or re-use of this style bottle for beer was also quite common in the U.S. Fredericksburg Bottling Co. used an engraved (aka “etched”) apollinaris bottle used most likely for beer; The apollinaris bottle and champagne style beer bottle are almost identical in shape and only product specific embossing (or etching) or the original labeling will allow one to differentiate what any specific bottle of this style was used for.
