hiawatha stomach bitters

[appliedlips]

Muriatic acid is safe to use on bottles and I use it often. It will not however remove the ground stain on the bottle pictured, nor will any chemical. A tumble will be the only way of cleaning it. The glass is actually damaged and the outer layer will need removed and polished,which the tumbling process does. If you are interested in selling the bottle I may be interested. Congrats.

 

[bashcraft]

The white staining on the bottle will come off in my opinion. It is soft and crumbly. We'll see, in between the flooding events were dealing with. As far as selling....I bought a box of old trapping lures once, circa 1900, for about $7. They still had their original shipping containers, and several still had their wax seal. I sold them to a collector for a considerable profit, but I never really got over the hole they left on my cabinet. If I do decide to sell, I will let you know though.

Brent Ashcraft

 

[bashcraft]

I had a little free time today between vacuuming up the water invading my basement from the 15" of rain we have gotten over the past week. The bottle cleaned pretty well, but did expose a "love scratch", and indeed there was a white staining left (never question an expert). Interesting how the different types of collectors look at things. An artifact collector would call that "patina", and would give somebody a sideways look if they tried to take it off. I did look at some photos of tumble cleaned bottles, and do say that they are gorgeous. Anyway, not bad for a blind squirrel. In addition to the bitters bottle, I got a swamp root kidney bottle, an older mason jar, a moonshine crock (sans thumb ring), and three old whiskey bottles, one of which contains sorghum from who knows when, complete with a corn cob stopper, for the princely sum of $15.

 

[bottlekid76]

Hiya Brent,

Nice bottle! I'm in Missouri as well. Looks like you made a great buy! Another thing you can do to make it shine and take some of the white film off for displaying it is regular old mineral oil. It will help take away some of the cloudiness and light haze. It just helps mask it tho, and as Doug mentioned, a tumble would really turn it into a sparkler. []

All the best,
~Tim