"NONTOX" Beer Bottle

CanYaDigIt · Nov 14, 2009

I can't find anything on the company or product. Has anyone dug or seen this one before? Where is it from? I figure it's a non-alcoholic beer from the early prohibition years. It has a tooled crown and was blown in a 4 piece mold, five if you count the base piece.

surfaceone · Nov 14, 2009

Hey Aaron,

Interesting bottle, man. I tried a search with the limited information presented, and found...

Odd, but perhaps totally unrelated news story. Ya think there could be a Nontox in there?

What Beer Co. put that out?

CanYaDigIt · Nov 14, 2009

All it says is UNION ADE BEER CO. / "NONTOX" / REG. TRADE MARK. Pretty sure it was supposed to say UNION MADE.

surfaceone · Nov 15, 2009

Mother's in the kitchen, washing out the jugs;
Sister's in the pantry, bottling the suds;
Father's in the cellar, mixing up the hops;
Johnny's on the porch, watching for the cops.

Pictures & poetry found @ beerhistory.com

Hello Aaron,

I couldn't find anything on Nontox either, and I searched up, down & sideways. Seems like the history of Near Beer is not very complete. Might make an interesting sub-category for a beer collector.

Photos from here.

Yours is a handsome error bottle. I'm sure you are correct about it being early Prohibition era.

I did find one other interesting conversion of breweries in the WWI prohibition times, to the manufacture of dye.

Thanks for putting up this bottle, maybe someone will find something on Nontox history, one of these days.

CanYaDigIt · Nov 15, 2009

Thanks surfaceone. Those photos are great. I looked and looked for even a mention of the name and found NOTHING. Pretty weird. I recently was in St Louis for a concert and went by the Budweiser brewery for their free tour. They have tons of bottles there, including some of the very first ones (blob tops) before Adolphus Bush was part of the company. They also have a bunch of the products they made during prohibition, including bakers yeast and ginger ale. Pretty cool tour. It's worth going to the brewery just to see the old bottles and beer steins.

BarbaraInCalif · Nov 16, 2009

Hi Aaron...other question would be who was still making BIM bottles in the 1920's?
Perhaps it's older than you think?

Barbara

capsoda · Nov 16, 2009

Could you imagine hitting someone with one of those beer bottles like on TV. I bet the head would fly all to pieces instead of the bottle.

I bet the chillens would quieten down after a few Budweiser ice cream cones.[

]

athometoo · Nov 17, 2009

seems like i remember reading about non-tox as being a marketing scheme to get people to feel safe with their product . there was alot of products in the t.o.c era that had no regulation . have you ever drank a bad beer , back then they had little to no refrigeration . glad to see your finding some bottles though . Many cleansers, sanitizers, and other chemicals are used during the beer production process. Traces of such chemicals can be found in finished beer, and different breweries use different types of chemicals. Large breweries analyze their beer for contaminants using sensors and sophisticated laboratory techniques to ensure that the product has not been adulterated. Cleansers are typically rinsed from the inside of brewing vessels and fermentation tanks, but sanitizers are typically not rinsed, as the rinse water can introduce unwanted microorganisms. Remnants of sanitizing chemicals do make it into finished beer, but the active chemical compounds that kill microbes are oxidized or otherwise neutralized and converted into harmless compounds. Nevertheless, the sanitizer does introduce unnatural compounds to the beer. Some breweries such as Anheuser Busch use pure steam to sanitize vessels and tanks, thus minimizing or eliminating chemical contamination.

RIBottleguy · Jan 8, 2015

Re: RE: "NONTOX" Beer Bottle

Surprised to see this old thread was not locked. I have one of these bottles I won off ebay a few years back. It is not an error bottle. The Union Ade Beer Co. was from Guthrie, Ok. It was organized in 1905.

SFBEER · Oct 26, 2015

Re: RE: "NONTOX" Beer Bottle

I have collected San Francisco beer bottles for over 45 years and have one of these Union Ade bottles in my collection. The manufacture of the bottle looks suspiciously western. I found the company in the San Francisco Directory and as I recall it was before 1906 (crowns go back into the '90s). I quickly checked the 1905 SF Directory and it was not there. When I recheck it and find the listing I will post.

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