A 16th Century Priest and Miller High Life: How Bottled Beer and What Happened on New Year's Eve 1903 Changed History Forever

 It’s the year 1903, and if you’re a beer drinker and a homebody, well then, you have a problem.

Unless you’re wealthy or lucky enough to live in a big city with a large brewery in 1903, if you want to enjoy a cold one at home then you better be carrying a bucket.

In the 19th century most beer drinkers are still forced to either consume their beer on site in dark, dank, smoke-filled taverns and saloons--something not exactly suitable for ladies or well-to-do gentlemen--or they need to bring a wooden bucket or metal pail to their local bar and take their beers “to go” if you will.

A bucket full of beer is never a bad thing (in my humble opinion) as long as you can drink it quickly, but it isn’t exactly the most convenient system for consuming a cold one on your couch after a long day’s work at the factory, shop, office or wherever else, either.

But, oddly enough, it isn’t as if bottled beer hadn't been invented yet at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, bottled beer by 1900 had been around for over three-hundred years, since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I during the 1500’s!

The only problem with bottled beer before the twentieth century is that bottled beer still had a lot of problems.

Although, technically, there is no exact date for the invention of bottled beer, at least not a date that would necessarily stand up to the scrutiny of any thorough academic historians, there is a quaint bit of historical folklore that gives us some inkling into when those lovely golden suds were first bottled for transport.

Legend and lore has it that bottled beer was first invented by an English parish priest and avid fisherman named Alexander Nowell on July 13, 1568.  Yes, as legend has it, the connection between bottled beer and fishing may stretch back over four and a half centuries!  Fans of Busch Light and Natural Ice everywhere can now rejoice.

According to a contemporary friend and fishing expert named Izaak Walton who authored a treatise on the sport of fishing at the end of the 16th century entitled The Compleat Angler, avid fisherman and priest Alexander Nowell, “{W}as observed to spend a tenth part of his time in angling…and to bestow a tenth part of his revenue, and usually all his fish, amongst the poor that inhabited near to those rivers in which it was caught saying often that, ‘charity gave life to religion.’”

Father Alexander Nowell

After the death of this “keen angler” and avid theologian, credit for the invention of the beer bottle was first given to Alexander Nowell by English historian Thomas Fuller in his 17th century work of biographical history entitled The Worthies of Britain.

In The Worthies of Britain Fuller stated of Alexander Nowell that one day in early July 1568, Father Nowell stopped at a local tavern prior to setting out on one of his afternoon fishing trips and had the bartender fill a hand blown glass bottle with ale and seal it with a cork.  While fishing from the riverbank that afternoon Nowell apparently became so engrossed in catching bass that he forgot all about the bottle of ale lying in the tall grass at the water’s edge.

A few days later, July 13, 1568 to be exact, when Alexander Nowell returned to the same spot for some more fishing, he found the unopened bottle of ale.  When Nowell uncorked the bottle he, according to Fuller, “found no bottle, but a gun, such was the sound of the opening thereof; and this is believed the original bottled ale in England.”

After being left sealed on the riverbank for several days the bottled ale that Nowell rediscovered, if you will, would have underwent an additional fermentation process and built up increased carbonation that would have been unheard of at the time among drinkers of largely flat ales and beers from lukewarm taps in taverns and inns across England and Europe.  This increase in pressure would also have accounted for the sound “of a gun” that Nowell would have heard when he popped the cork and it could also be rightfully assumed that he was probably soaked in stale ale and likely had to abandon the rest of his fishing trip.

Nonetheless, if this tale is true, then Father Alexander Nowell of Hertfordshire, England, did indeed ‘discover’ bottled beer on July 13, 1568.

And though the extra fizziness of this new bottled brew was definitely a novelty at the time, there was still one huge problem with bottled beer, and that was that hand-blown glass bottles of the time simply weren’t strong enough to handle the carbon-dioxide pressure that built up in beers and ales over time, and bottled beers in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were likely to become explosive and shoot corks and glass shards across barrooms like bullets from a gun.

However, slowly over time, bottled brew did gain in popularity as glass became stronger and a taste for ale and beer with more carbonation developed first among Great Britain’s and then America’s upper class.

Not everyone was a fan though.  Thomas Tryon, English brewmaster and author who wrote one of history’s earliest treatises on the art of brewing beer called A New Art of Brewing Beere in 1681 wrote that, “(B)ottled beer or ale is not as good or wholesome as that drawn out of the barrel or hogshead; the chief thing that can be said of bottled beer or ale is that it will keep longer than in barrels, which is caused by its being in continuous fermentation.”

Glass and stone used for early bottles was expensive and each bottle had to be filled and corked by hand, therefore, for over two centuries bottled beer except among the rich and elite remained a rarity and was typically only used as a means of overseas import.  

17th Century Beer Bottles

Up until the dawn of the twentieth century, if the average Joe six-pack wanted to enjoy a cold one at home, he still had to trudge to the local bar to fill up his bucket or pail.

But all of that was about to change on New Year’s Eve 1903.

In the late 1800’s advancements in bottling made beer production much more mechanized and efficient, and improvements in America’s transportation system, most notably railroads that criss-crossed the nation, made it possible for breweries to market their beers on a national, and even an international scale.

Finally, use of smaller corks attached to twelve ounce bottles by means of metal wire caps, made bottled beer affordable to the masses for the first time ever.

And then came New Year’s Eve 1903. 

On that momentous New Year’s Eve the Miller Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin debuted its High Life Beer touted then as, “The Champagne of Bottled Beers”.

High Life was packaged in special clear glass bottles with elongated necks designed to showcase the clarity of the extra bubbly pilsner.  The shape of the bottle accentuated not only the fizzy evervescence of the beer, but also made Miller’s budget brand of bottled beer seem somehow more classy than it ever actually was.

Prior to High Life’s introduction, most beers which had to be drawn from a tap, or a barrel, were cloudy almost opaque in color, but using a special cork covered in ornate gold foil just like a real miniature champagne bottle, the Miller Brewing Company was not only able to showcase the clarity of its brew, but also appeal to a wider range of drinkers, most notably women by marketing their affordable beer as “champagne” disguised as beer.

By 1905, only two years after its initial debut on New Year’s Eve, Miller High Life introduced the now iconic “High Life Girl” and launched America’s first nationwide beer advertising campaign.  

The High Life Girl was intended to have beauty and class, a sex appeal that was meant to be attractive to male beer drinkers, while the mere fact that the High Life Girl was, well, a girl to begin with, made her attractive to female beer drinkers.

Early versions of the High Life Girl had her shooting out of a bottle of bubbly beer and up into the sky like a rocket, soon however, she would be shown toasting the world from a crescent moon perch, where she remains seated to this very day.

For most of the first half of the twentieth century Miller High Life would continue to be America’s most popular and iconic bottled beer.  Over time, though, as tastes changed Miller High Life would be replaced by bigger and more iconic American competitors most notably Budweiser as the world’s most popular beer.

But, though times may have changed and today Miller High Life, might only be most popular among budget minded beer shoppers and millennial hipsters seeking to appear blue collar, the High Life Girl still remains seated atop her crescent moon raising a toast to us all.  A toast to remind us that, if it wasn’t for her, New Year’s Eve 1903 and the miracle of bottled beer from so long ago, we’d all still be lugging wooden buckets and metal pails around after work and telling the local bartender to fill ‘er up.