Somewhere along my path to Loving beer, well after college, I began collecting bottles from the different beers I have drank. At first I even bought two beers and only drank one, saving the other. At the time I didn’t understand the concept of a beer Cellar or what type of beers cellared well and which ones didn’t. I let over 4 cases of beers just go bad, keeping them for about 10 years before finally emptying the bottles. I then kept the bottles for quite awhile later, collecting more over the years until I was storing well over 300 empty bottles. Finally, I just started taking photos of the bottles and then threw most of them away only keeping one’s I thought either looked cool or were unique in some sort of way.

About 20 years ago I began my trip of beer appreciation and also began collecting beer steins, getting some of the first ones from places like Disney World and finally picking up some off the Internet and up at places like Holland, MI and Helen, GA were Belgian and German steins were sold in touristy areas. I’m only got about 10-15 at this point and haven’t really actively pursued purchases only getting them when I noticed one I liked.

The last thing I began to “collect” were beer glasses, mainly started when I began going to a place called Taco Mac here in the Atlanta area. The first place I got my “beer list” started was at one off of Roswell Rd in Sandy Springs that is now closed up, today they are called Summits but they would give out glasses on special days they would call “Pint Nights” and when you drank a certain beer you got a glass. Back then if you drank 2 you got 2 glasses, 3 – 3 glasses, etc. Now I’ve found several places that do these “Pint Nights” and have to say I’ve gotten about 90% of my glasses through these giveaways.

Even after getting rid of most of my beer bottles and substituting photos, I did end up keeping the bottle caps from most of the bottles, actually just the different caps. I plan on taking photos of the caps together for a wallpaper for my computer and possibly in order to have a framed photo someday. I’m sure I have over 100, although I haven’t done much with them after initially photographing them a while back. Since then I’m sure I’ve added quite a few more.

http://www.beersteinsandmugs.com/