History of The Collection
The beer bottle and can collection, also known as 'The Collection', started sometime in the late 1980's. During the middle and end of high school, my good friend Mark and I were interested in both brewing beer and drinking quality new and unique beer . Our main source of new beer was Whole Foods Market in Houston. We used to go to the location next to the old Alabama theater, which later moved to a larger building in the late 1990's. I can still walk into a Whole Foods Market today and the smell takes me back to those days.
Mark was a typical highschooler and his room was a mess. He never really cleaned up much, and so the beer bottles tended to accumulate. In one sense there was no reason to throw the bottles away because seeing the empty bottles from such locations as Belgium, Germany, Britain, California, and Japan was a reminder of the exotic and fantastic variety of beers we had tried. I, being prone to tidying things up, made three levels of make-shift shelves using old boards and soda pop crates. I then lined up the empty bottles on the shelves to get them out of the way and so we could admire them. The collection was born, and had a total size of perhaps 75 bottles and cans.
A couple years after we started college, Mark moved into an apartment in Denton, Texas. We soon realized that it was a great place to display the collection. We made cheap shelves using 1 by 4 boards, metal L-brackets, and drywall screws. We attached the shelves to the walls in the living room and bedroom, the two largest rooms in the apartment. Within a couple of years, the collection had multiplied to over 800 pieces and all of the shelves were full. It was fantastic to see all 800+ pieces displayed and organized by country.
One weekend I hauled a Compaq Portable II luggable 286 PC up to Denton and we cataloged the whole collection using the database component of Microsoft Works 2.0 for DOS. It took all weekend to type the information about each piece into the database. A year or so later, we transfered the database to Microsoft Access 95. When Mark moved out of that apartment the bottles were put into boxes.
We continue to seek out new and interesting beers, and the collection has continued to grow. Most of the items come from local sources such as Spec's Liquor Warehouse, which has the best beer selection in Houston. I also buy beer whenever I travel out of the city or state. Several years ago a friend in Germany sent me a crate of 12 full bottles. One of them broke during the 6 week sea voyage to the USA, but the other 12 were in good shape.
As of July 2003, the collection has over 2050 pieces, with about 90% being bottles. The bottles range from 7oz. to 3 liters in size, and the cans range from 6 oz. to over 2 liters. The collection continues to be stored in boxes. I enter all new pieces into the database and when I accumulate 10 or 20 items, I wrap them in paper and put them into a numbered cardboard box. The boxes get stored at my parents' house because they have extra room.
Over the years, the collection has spawned a few different projects. When I moved off to college, I started collecting beer bottle labels since I couldn't accumulate beer bottles in my dorm room. To this day I still collect the extra labels from bottles that we already have in the collection, and have accumulated several hundred. Many of these labes have been glued to the outside to two cedar chests that I have built. The latest project is to finally get the collection database online so that it can be publically viewed.
Although I prefer to drink the beer from each bottle or can that I add to the collection, there are times when this is not possible, such as when a friend or relative brings me an empty bottle from another country. If you would like to contribute to the collection, I would be happy to consider your entry. Please email me if you would like to donate an item or more. Full bottles are the best, but empty bottles are okay too.
