Even before I learned to love beer, I loved bottles. Not necessarily rare or old bottles, either. I recall finding some beverage that came in a thick cobalt-colored bottle as a teenager and spending far too much time getting the label off so I could put it in my window.

When I was even younger, my cousin and I would walk back to an old trash dump on the farm that sat next to what had been a house. I don’t know how old the dump was, but it was probably from the ’50s at the latest. We’d pull up tons of interesting old bottles with inscriptions and raised lettering and try to figure out what they used to contain. Then we’d line them up and shoot them with a .22. In retrospect, that was probably a bad idea.

If I’d have saved them instead of exploding them, I could have used the “Historic Glass Bottle Identification & Information Website,” created by the Bureau of Land Management and now maintained by a former employee. Browsing through the identification indexes makes me want to go out and dig up some old bottles again.

Historic Glass Bottle Website [Sha.org]