North American Soda & Beer Bottles

Bottle Attributes Shapes

The shape of a bottle has a lot to say about a bottle's age and the product that it held. Regional preferences and traditions help to dictate what shapes were popular and for how long. Some forms are noticeably rare or absent from some areas of the country while popular in others. Porter beer bottles, which were used to bottle ales, porters and stouts, exist in less than half a dozen forms in the Western states, but were extremely popular in Eastern Pennsylvania, with thousands of examples; even though these styles of beer were popular in both areas of the country.

Special patents also dictated a bottle's shapes. Some patents were more popular than others. The 1879 Hutchinson patent, from Chicago, was used by over 4,000 different firms for their bottles, while the 1875 Arthur Christin patent, of the same city, was only used in a few dozen.

Bottles from different countries also vary greatly. Codd patent bottles from the United States are uncommon, but are the norm in Bermuda and other English Colonies. Hutchinson patent bottles are directly the opposite, with over 12,000 example from North America and few others in the rest of the world.

The following bottle shapes are documented on this site:

Click on the links above to get more information on an attribute or to identify a bottle that you are researching.