When it comes to crafting the perfect beer, bottling is just as important as fermentation. So let’s take a look at a few benefits of using glass bottles for beer including light protection, heat protection, recycling, and most importantly flavour.
To ensure that your beer tastes great and remains fresh for long periods of time, you need to select the proper bottle for its storage. Out of all the options available, darker glass beer bottles are the preferred choice for storing and preserving beer.
Light Protection
Beer is sensitive to light and can easily become skunked if exposed to too much UV light. Fortunately, glass bottles for beer are often darker in colour and are usually green or amber, providing excellent protection from light and blocking out 98% of UV rays.
This means that your beer will remain fresh even after extended periods in direct sunlight or fluorescent lighting.
Heat Protection
The temperature inside a bottle affects how quickly your beer will age. With glass bottles, you can rest assured that your beer won’t warm up as quickly as other options like cans.
Glass is an excellent insulator with low thermal conductivity meaning that it doesn’t transfer heat efficiently between its interior and exterior surfaces, like other materials do. As a result, your beer will remain relatively stable for longer periods of time compared to other types of containers.
Ability To Reuse And Recycle
For those looking to reduce their environmental footprint, glass bottles offer an attractive option due to their reusability and recyclability; both qualities help reduce waste accumulation in landfills significantly. Glass is 100% recyclable and can be recycled multiple times without any reduction in quality. This makes it one of the most environmentally friendly packaging options available.
Beer just tastes better from a Glass bottle
Glass bottles are highly recommended for beer storage as they help enhance the flavour. Bottle conditioning is a process in which unfiltered beer is bottled with small amounts of yeast and sugar. The yeast consumes the sugar and produces carbon dioxide, which is trapped in the bottle, resulting in natural carbonation.
As the bottle conditioned beer ages, the yeast slowly ferments, releasing flavours and aromas that add complexity to the beer. The micro-oxygenation that occurs within the glass bottle as a result of a small amount of air introduction, allows the beer to develop and evolve further.
The glass bottle keeps out oxygen, allowing enough trapped air inside for the yeast to mature the beer. This process doesn't occur in cans, which means that the flavour notes in bottle-conditioned beers lead to a unique experience for beer lovers.
Therefore, storing beer in glass bottles helps retain and enhance its complexity of flavour, making it a preferred choice amongst the purists, who value the nuances of each bottle conditioned beer.
Glass is an ideal material for storing craft beers because it offers superior protection against light, heat retention abilities, and reusability/recyclability features that make it a more cost-effective option in the long run compared to other materials.
Not only does glass extend the shelf life of beer by providing better protection from light, but it also helps preserve the flavour intensity by maintaining consistent temperature levels compared to other types of packaging materials used for storing beer. All these factors contribute towards making glass an ideal solution for bottling plants and craft brewers alike who want their beers to stay fresh until the time comes to savour the flavour.