United States
Machine-made glass makes bottled beer cheap
Automatic bottle production makes glass cheap and uniform, and — with the crown cork already available — turns packaged beer into a mass-market product.
Bottles had been blown individually, varying in shape and strength and expensive enough to be worth reclaiming. Machine production made them cheap and, more importantly for brewing, identical — and identical bottles are what allow mechanical filling and capping.
The two technologies needed each other. Cheap bottles were useless without a reliable closure and reliable closures were useless without cheap bottles, which is why packaged beer becomes a mass market around the turn of the century rather than when either first appeared.
What was going on around it
An event on its own is a date. These are the periods it belongs to, where the argument about what changed is actually made.
Why it matters
Beer became something bought and taken home rather than only drunk where it was sold, which begins the long decline of the pub as the default place to drink and makes national brands worth building.
How well this is established
| Certainty | Documented. Supported by contemporary records that survive and are agreed on. |
|---|---|
| When | 1903. Known to the year rather than to the day. |
| Where | United States |
Either side of this
← 1900: The sparkler divides British cask service · 1908: A brewery statistician publishes the t-distribution →
See the whole sequence on the beer history timeline.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.