If you love beer, you probably think a lot about which beer to buy based on flavor profile. You might not put a ton of thought into the package that protects the beer. A passionate new video about refillable glass beer bottles from an Oregon craft brewery is full of reasons to do just that.
“The future is a refillable package,” says Matt Swihart, founder of Double Mountain Brewery & Cidery. The brewery is located in Hood River, a place that Swihart says is downright “magical.” Protecting its beauty is a cause he takes to heart, and it’s why he so firmly believes in using a returnable, refillable glass beer bottle.
Refillable glass bottles take the world’s most sustainable package a step further. They can be refilled about 25 times before recycling – sometimes even more — while delivering up to 66 times less CO2 emissions, per container, than aluminum cans. This makes refillable glass bottles one of the lowest CO2 emitting packaging choices.
The refillable nature of the bottle is on top of all the benefits of beer in glass bottles. Glass beer bottles have an all-natural composition of limestone, silica sand and soda ash. Those materials make glass bottles tough and virtually inert. The glass bottle doesn’t interact with the beer inside, meaning you’ll enjoy it the way the brewer intended.
In 2018, the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative (OBRC) and Double Mountain partnered with O-I Glass to design a returnable, refillable beer bottle for breweries across the state. OBRC also implemented a process for collecting, washing, and redistributing the refillable glass bottles to breweries. Several other Oregon breweries are also now using the OBRC refillable glass bottle. Swihart encourages beer lovers and breweries who care about the planet to become users of and advocates for reusable, refillable glass beer bottles.
“If you want to make an impact on reducing the fossil fuels that are destroying our world, you need to make individual choices. One of them is choosing a bottle that gets reused — taking your business to the places that are putting the best practices in place,” he says in the video. “If you’re a brewery, I encourage you to use the best bottle going, that tastes the best and has the least carbon in its lifecycle.”
You can watch Double Mountain’s new video about refillable glass beer bottles above as well as on the brewery’s YouTube channel.
