It produces just under two billion bottles to be filled with beer and released onto the market, and around one third of these are special custom-made models.

The bottles designed and developed for a specific brand of beer are characterised by their unique features and distinctive design. Their look and feel gives customers and consumers a hint of the flavour sensation contained inside, their eyes seeing and their hands feeling the pleasure that awaits their taste buds. Embossing and engraving are used to highlight the brand name in particular, as well as to depict simplified versions of heraldic beer motifs.

From large to small
The biggest beer bottle produced by Vetropack has a volume of 2 litres, while the smallest holds just 0.25 litres. Any size is possible in between – including 1 litre, 0.75 litres, 0.66 litres, 0.50 litres, 0.40 litres, 0.33 litres, to name but a few.

From clear to black
Just like their unconventional, custom-designed cousins, the standard bottles – including the popular long-necked and short-necked varieties and Vichy-style models – are available in amber, green or flint (clear) glass, although blue and black are not an option for the standard range.
Amber glass, along with the comparatively rarely used black variety, provides the best light protection that glass bottles can offer. Green glass, which is more translucent, falls in the middle of the range in this respect, which is why green or transparent beer bottles need secondary packaging to provide additional protec- tion against the effects of light. This packaging may take the form of traditional beer crates for multi-trip bottles, a folding box for one-way bottles, or wrap-around packaging, an all-round solution for several beer bottles.

A better grip or a lighter weight?
The weight of a beer bottle depends on whether it is designed to be used once or several times over. Multi-trip bottles need to be more robust and therefore tend to be heavier than one-way bottles, which are becoming increasingly lighter thanks to modern technology.

Closing and opening mouths
Traditional swingstoppers are featured on speciality beers and multi-trip bottles in particular, but crown corks are the most common form of beer bottle closure. Twist crown corks are quick and easy to open without the need for any tools, although small pull rings are also used to help remove standard crown corks. Both these types of opening are primarily found on one-way bottles.

Vetropack offers suitable bottle mouth designs for all types of closure and can even provide a new kind of optimised mouth for twist crown corks: with its slightly modified mouth geometry, this solution improves production reliability, as customers who are already using this system will testify. The new mouth solution (number 1277) has been in mass production since March 2012 and is protected by an international patent.

Source: Vetropack Group/vetropack.ch