We have been out and about selling our beer for just over a month now, and a question we regularly get asked is “Why did you choose 660ml bottles?”. It wasn’t an easy decision, and it took quite some deliberation, so we thought we would try and explain our thinking here.

Since we started up Good Chemistry Brewing, one of our guiding principles has been to always question and justify the decisions we make. Nothing about our brewery, our beers or our processes should be there because it’s the accepted way of doing things. This doesn’t mean doing things differently for the sake of it, but it does mean thinking about what we do and challenging the status quo. This was our starting point for choosing a bottle too.
Without question the industry standard sizes for beer are 500ml and 330ml. These are the sizes that most breweries use, but why? The 330ml serving seems to have originally come from the American use of fluid ounces, whereas the 500ml serving has come from the more European use of a half litre. Pubs in the UK are used to serving beer in pints, or half pints, but hardly any bottled beer is sold this way.

When we thought about how we like to drink beer at home, the 330ml serving was our preferred size. We felt that this was big enough to be a good size drink, but small enough that it didn’t get warm and flat by the time you got to the end. It also suits drinking out of a curved, stemmed glass, which can enhance the aroma of the beer, improve its head retention and make it look prettier (and if you don’t think that matters you’re just wrong!).

However, there were negative points to 330ml bottles. Buying smaller bottles is worse value for the customer as the cost per ml is much higher. Packaging in smaller bottles means more waste, more energy to transport, and so a higher environmental impact. Packaging in smaller bottles can also be worse for the beer as there is a greater proportion of beer in contact with the air in the bottle (we try to ensure that this ‘air’ is mostly carbon dioxide when packaged, but there will always be some oxygen ingress). Smaller bottles also mean more work for us to fill them!

So, we decided to look at bigger bottles. 500ml bottles didn’t seem to make any sense to us, other than being the industry standard. By selling our beer in the same size package as everyone else we make sure that they fit on the same sized shelves. This might seem like a small consideration, but can be crucial to getting a good, visible position on a shelf or in a fridge. Another benefit is that standard sized bottles make it easier for the consumer to compare prices. However, we know that prices vary wildly for craft beer and consumers do not make decisions on price alone. We considered beer quality to be a much more important driver for sales. The fact that 500ml is close to being a pint didn’t sway us either – because it’s not a pint.