Wear and tear on the bottle each trip, especially the screw threads if it has them.
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How will this work when someone wants to crunch the bottle for $0.05 at a local grocer’s recycling machine?
IIRC discounting hyper local options. The switch to cans has a larger impact on carbon emissions. A significant amount of the emissions involved come from shipping the beer. Cans aren’t just lighter than bottles. They’re a shit ton lighter. And significantly more compact. Allowing more units to be shipped for significantly less weight. This is a large reason why canned beer is cheaper than bottled. And a big reason why so many craft options are switching. You can measurably lower brewery expenses, offer a more competative price, and still make an improved margin.
So reusable containers may very well be greener. In the context of a brewery that does not ship beer outside of their own area. But even your local brewery. If they wholesale outside their immediate area. Could likely lower their carbon footprint by canning. Remember once you’re outside of an intensely local distribution area. Those bottles have to be transported back to the brewery in bulk.
I’ve yet to meet the brewery that won’t. And I’m on the East Coast and work in craft beer.
Seems like a common misconception though, I’ve seen an awful lot of service people frustratedly explain “no it doesnt have to our growler”. And to explain it more than a few times myself.
Current bottles aren’t really meant for it. But they can be. Most breweries stopped doing so decades ago as distribution chains went national then global. As the expense of collecting the bottles, shipping them back, sorting and cleaning them became difficult to justify. Its still a thing. Especially in developing or small countries. The RedStripe short neck bottle is intended to be returned and refilled (thicker glass, screenprinted label, and embossing). But the company only does so in Jamaica itself. As its a practical or impossibility to get your bottles back from halfway around the world.
It just isn’t something that scales well. You can look into the issue with kegs to see why. Kegs are expensive and a brewery needs to have multiple times their actual capacity in their pool. As at any given time multiple sets of kegs are just spooling their way back through the supply chain. They frequently go missing or never return.
Most breweries that are huge these days rent kegs. And many European breweries are moving to “one way” no returnable, fully recyclable single use kegs to deal with it.
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To me using growlers makes more sense than reusing glass bottles, and as you said, the majority of breweries already offer this. The potential downside would be long term storage of a particular brew, maybe? I don’t know, i sometimes like to stock some particular harder to find brews and keep the bottles in my fridge and open them much later and i don’t know what you’d need to do that with a growler… but if i was offered a good deal/incentive for completely eschewing bottles and cans i would gladly do so.
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Growlers arent really suitable for storage longer than 48 hours. Though there are better growler systems that can purge the bottle and pressurize it with co2. They claim 30 days sealed, 7 days once opened. But in reality its more like 7 days sealed and 12 hours opened.
Better for the beer are crowler systems. Basically single can versions of a canning line. Fully sealed, pressurized, light impermiable just like any other can. And avaiable in sizes from 12-32oz. Even seen a few 64oz ones.
But for the evironment’s sake any growler you aren’t getting directly from the brewery, or from any brewery that distributes at least state wide. Is still going throug all that insanely inefficient keg distribution system. So its probably not reducing the brewery’s carbon footprint much. And isn’t doing much to your own contribution to that.
IIRC keg distribution is more environmentally friendly than cans. But not by much. It is significantly cheaper for the brewery though.
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I guess steins were a few hundred years ahead of their time…
This being a research area of interest to me, I’ve done multiple controlled studies regarding this very subject.
Unfortunately, no growler in the study has remained unemptied beyond 2 hours.
Conclusion: scientifically speaking, I might have a problem…
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I was a beer brewer at Maisel in Bayreuth Germany, and over here all bottles are washed and reused. It’s just how Germans expect to get their beer, and buy them in reusable cases with 20 bottles at 0.5 liters per bottle. Many even still have Bügelverschlüsse (flip-top stoppers). Then again, beer consumption is local, so reusing the glass is more important than saving fuel in transportation.
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Interesting comments, thanks! How does the material impact the equation? Aluminium (yes, that’s how it should be spelled!) is energy hungry stuff, at least for the initial extraction. I don’t know how it compares to glass for recycling. And you couldn’t re-use a single-use aluminium can, it would have to be made thicker (as for glass). It would still be lighter than glass, but would be more expensive.
The other part that makes a difference, as I understand it, is that this is a state-wide initiative. So the bottles don’t necessarily have to go back to the original brewery, they only have to go back to the nearest brewery using those bottles. This could really help reduce transport.
Congratulations to Oregon for this move. When I moved to Germany I was surprised to find that (almost) all glass and plastic bottles include pfand (deposit), and you can return them to any drink seller, supermarket, shopping center, etc. Even some of the plastic bottles are multi-use. It works really well.
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Become a night-watchman at a local brewery and carry a drinking straw with you?
(That was silliness only. I would not advocate theft.)
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… or cases of 24 bottles at 0.33 litres per bottle.
Which makes for a nice advent calendar.
Cases can double as furniture.
We should meet for drinks next time I’m in Munich.
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I thought that was standard in most of Europe. I made a lot of money from collecting beer bottles from teenage discos.
Glass bottles can be used around 33 times before it is crushed and reused.
Give me enough warning, and I’ll get a case of Haderner. A small brewery that is just around the street from me.
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Meanwhile over here in uncivilized, crusty old socialist europe, we have had such bottles for… decades?
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I knew a guy that worked for a brewery in Colorado, he told me that they get all the free beer they could ever want 
They had a tap in the breakroom and they could take home cases of beer every payday.
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Everything old is new again I suppose. When I was a kid, the bottle deposit on the 16 oz Coke bottles was a dime. Many times I would simply start walking to the local corner store with a couple of nickels in my pocket and collect the Coke bottles that that been thrown out of car windows. They were thick glass and usually would bounce instead of breaking.
Usually I could find enough empty Coke bottles on the way to pay for a full one and not have to dip into my change unless I wanted some candy too.
They “fixed” they system in the mid 80’s and went to non-returnable.
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They call that Haustrunk in Germany, and it is actually included in the union contracts.
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Damn. Didn’t know Seinfeld had done that…
