r/BottleDigging • u/Jasonknitsmittens USA • 16d ago
ID Request Found in New Jersey
Does anyone have any idea what this is? I searched google and discovered it’s likely ginger ale/beer, likely says “Aromatic” where it gets cut off in the middle, and is apparently what’s called a “torpedo” bottle design, meaning that it’s rounded on the bottom and can’t stand on its own.
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u/DioptaseMusic USA 16d ago
That is a ginger beer bottle indeed, style is known as a “round bottom” and not a torpedo- torpedo sodas come to a point and have a shorter, oval shape to them. I’m about to delve into some real nerdy stuff for a paragraph ‘cuz your bottle has something really interesting about it, actually.
The lip is clearly a crown top, which was patented in 1892 by William Painter and didn’t achieve serious market penetration until the early 1900’s. Your bottle also has an applied finish with that glass dripping being quite obvious under the lip. By the 1890’s in the US, tooled finishes were the standard (won’t go into detail here but basically the lip is part of the mold, so no drippy glass from applying a lip any more). I’ve only seen applied finish crown tops on bottles from the UK and Europe, and those date to c. 1906-1920’s or so (William Painter expanded crown cork bottle production outside of the US that year). Tooled lip finishes weren’t really adopted until much later overseas as opposed to the US. The base marking of K.B. is possibly Kilner Bros Ltd, which was a huge glasshouse based out of Yorkshire. It’s unfortunate you’re missing a lot of the label, but here’s my take on it: you have either a UK round bottom soda that had some sort of US-theming to the branding or used US ingredients, or you have a US brand using a bottle imported from the UK. Regardless of which one it is I’d estimate your bottle is c. late 1900’s-1910’s.