How glass bottles were made, and what that did for cider

A seventeenth- or eighteenth-century bottle was blown by a gaffer working from a gathering of molten glass, shaped by breath, tools and rotation, and finished at the neck by hand. No two were identical. Capacity varied by a substantial margin between bottles from the same works, wall thickness varied within a single bottle, and strength varied with it.

That has three consequences for cider. A bottle of uncertain capacity cannot be sold as a measure, so bottled drink was sold by the bottle and the buyer took the variance. A bottle of uncertain wall thickness cannot be relied on to hold pressure, so bottling a cider with fermentation unfinished meant accepting breakages. And a hand-made object made one at a time by skilled men was expensive, which put bottled cider firmly at the top of the market.

The early bottles were nonetheless strong by the standards of the time, because English glasshouses had converted to coal firing and produced a dark, thick metal. Strength and uniformity are different properties, and English glass had the first well before it had the second.

From the middle of the eighteenth century glass in Britain was taxed by weight of the materials used, and the duty was raised repeatedly during the wars of the following decades. A tax on weight is a direct tax on the strength of a bottle, since strength is achieved by using more glass, and the duty therefore sat awkwardly against every use of glass that required a robust container.

The duty was administered intrusively, with excise officers resident at glasshouses, and it was one of the taxes the free-trade argument of the 1830s and 1840s was aimed at. It was repealed in the middle of the nineteenth century, and glass manufacture expanded sharply afterwards.

This is a good example of fiscal policy shaping a drink at one remove. Cider had its own excise history, and separately its containers were taxed in a way that affected what could be put in them and at what price. Neither tax was aimed at the other, and their combined effect on bottled cider was never anybody’s intention.

The decisive technical change of the early nineteenth century was blowing into a mould rather than shaping free-hand. A three-part mould gives a bottle of consistent external form and, within limits, consistent capacity, and it allows a maker’s name or a capacity mark to be formed in the glass itself. Moulded manufacture spread through the trade from the 1820s onwards.

Uniform capacity is what makes a bottle a measure, and a measurable container is what a regulated trade needs. It also allowed machinery: a bottle of predictable dimensions can be filled, corked and later capped by a machine, which a hand-blown one cannot.

The neck finish followed. Reliable, repeatable neck forms made possible the closures that came at the end of the century — the crown cap, patented in the 1890s and adopted quickly for carbonated drinks and beer, and the wired cork finish inherited from sparkling wine and used for bottle-conditioned cider. Closure and finish are one problem, and it could not be solved until bottles were consistent.

The change that made glass cheap was the fully automatic bottle machine, developed in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century and adopted internationally over the following two. It gathered, formed and finished a bottle without a glassblower, at rates a hand shop could not approach, and it collapsed the cost of a bottle within a generation.

It also ended a trade. Glassblowing had been a skilled, organised, well-paid occupation, and its displacement by machinery is a standard case in the industrial history of deskilling. That is worth stating alongside the benefits, because the cheap bottle that made packaged drink ordinary was bought at the price of the craft that had made bottles for four hundred years.

For cider the effect was direct. Bottled cider became a product a working household could buy rather than an estate product sold to the metropolitan trade, and the interwar growth of branded bottled cider rests on the availability of cheap uniform glass as much as on any development in the cellar.

The heavy returnable bottle deserves its own note, because cider used it more than most drinks. A large-format bottle, deposit-charged and collected for refilling, was the ordinary way to buy cider in quantity in Britain for much of the twentieth century, and the flagon acquired a specific social meaning in consequence. Returnable systems were dismantled from the 1970s onwards as one-trip containers and then plastic became cheaper than collection and washing.

The later container history is a history of substitution: lightweight glass, then the aluminium can from the mid-twentieth century, then polyethylene terephthalate from the 1970s, then bag-in-box for bulk. Each was cheaper and lighter than what it replaced, and each changed what cider was sold as. The very large plastic container is inseparable from the strong cheap cider question of the late twentieth century.

Glass survives where it is doing something the alternatives cannot: holding pressure over a long period, resisting oxygen ingress, and signalling that a product is meant to be taken seriously. The last of those is a marketing function, but the first two are physical, and they are why bottle-conditioned cider is still bottled in heavy glass.