Say goodbye to ordinary glass and elevate beer with ceramic bottles.
The second one is glass. The others are durable stoneware. They keep your beer colder longer. They are refillable and safer when broken.
Our bottles will be crafted by local artisans, bringing sustainability and style to your beer experience. Partnering with Digitalfire.com we will also help other potters and small manufacturers make them.
With this glaze these look so much like regular glass bottles it is hard to tell them apart. But there is a big difference: These don't need to be made by companies that can afford gigantic equipment and investment needed to mass produce glass bottles. These can be made in a home studio and by small business (using our help you can do it).
This clay body is the casting version of PlainsmanCoffee Clay. It burns darker, smoother and harder. As stoneware these bottles offer multiple advantages over glass: They are more durable, broken shards are much less of a cutting hazard, they retain cold better, they are refillable, the potential for aesthetic is much greater (in shape, color, decoration). Of course, the greatest advantage: They are cool, historic, traditional and can be made by small manufacturers.
This glaze is actually an amber transparent code-numbered GA6-B. It is made from a clay named "Alberta Slip" (produced by Plainsman Clays). Over the dark-burning clay body it has the same high gloss deep brown as normal beer bottles. Fired at stoneware temperatures this glaze is more durable than bottle glass. And it contains no heavy metal colorants, only iron oxide.
Remember, this is about the bottles, not the beer.
New design for beer bottle mold. Imagine a delivery truck that just brings the bottles!
Tuesday 5th August 2025
An 85-year-old Medalta Thrown Beer Bottle:
How can it be so white, speck-free and uncrazed?
These (right) were made individually in the factory during the 1930s and 1940s (the insides have pronounced throwing rings and slip drips). The potters were able to make up to 500 per day, even though they took the time to smooth the outside using a rib! The inside base of this one is bowl-shaped (the walls near the base are very thick), this helps explain how they were able to throw them so quickly.
Perhaps most surprising is how much whiter and speck-free the bottle is even though it is fired four cones higher than the crock (PlainsmanM340 at cone 6). Both pieces have porosities above 2%. Why? First, they got their clay from further east in Saskatchewan (near Willows), where the cleanest clays are much lower in iron contamination (likely the H0009 body). The whiteness is better even though they would have had to add some ball clay to make the clays more wheel-throwable. Second, they employed a wet process to refine the clay (slaking, blunging, sieving and filter pressing), this enabled them to sieve out the iron pyrite particles. Fortunately, modern dry grinding and air separation equipment is greener and able to accomplish without water.
Notice also the transparent G1129 glaze on the beer bottle (the upper section is likely the same glaze stained using iron oxide): After almost 100 years it has not crazed. This is both a testament to the ease of glaze fit these natural materials offer (because of the high quartz content) and the skill of the engineers of the time at matching the thermal expansion of glaze and body.
The original bottles were hand thrown and very heavy. This one, for example, weighs 525g. Our bigger slip cast equivalent with a modern shape, 3mm thick walls and much higher capacity weighs only 400g.
The color, enduring glaze fit and the type of clay used by Medalta indicates these were likely fired at least to cone 10. Energy was cheap at the time and the Saskatchewan clays they used require high firing.
This is a test mold to determine if the swing top stopper will work on a neck of this shape. This mold only weighs 87g and the walls are printed to only 0.8mm thickness. Two natches are sufficient to keep the halves aligned perfectly. Pieces will shrink about 12%, thus the larger size. We will use tissue transfers for the decorations, the GA6-B glaze for the inside and shoulder and G2926B transparent for the body.
3D print this, pour in plaster to make a slip casting mold! My previous work on this project assumed a smaller 3D printer (making it necessary to print flanged PLA mold sections that clip together). But larger 3D printers are now common, making the CAD work much easier. This drawing is parametric for height, body diameter, wall and plaster thickness, and neck height (for the full bottle set body=160mm, neck=96). This uses my standard clips and embeds (upper right). Neck vertices are proportional to height, so resizing works well. The top end is filleted to permit the longest possible mold on the print bed (diagonally). The bottom inside perimeter is chamfered, strengthening the default 0.8mm side wall junction to the base (that being said, be careful when removing it from the print bed, flexing too much will cause failure here).
Doing this smaller size is for prototyping and testing. Note that casting plaster on a 3D print creates artifacts (which will appear as wood grain, lower right), later I will create a hybrid plaster/PLA or rubber case mold. This PLA mold prints quickly, it has a hollow back side, permitting easy removal with a heat gun. There is no spare, it employs a pour spout, making the mold shorter and producing a better lip.
Need a stoneware slip casting recipe? L4768E or L4768H are a good choice. A glaze recipe? How about GA6-B (or similar)? Go full DIY with this, you will never turn back.
Regular bottles of beer looking very humble beside the ceramic one
This is v2 ceramic beer bottle in a common-sized 6-pack case. Of course, our case will have our logo and artwork. I paid $19 for it. They threw in the bottles of beer for free! That is a ceramic bottle that has bumped out the ordinary glass one and is showing off its size and superior character. But it is a tight fit in this case - it appears to be 4mm too large in diameter. I am sworn not to have another beer until it is served in a proper ceramic bottle like this. So if you live in my home town and want those six unneeded bottles, let me know.
Ceramic glazes are actually just glass. But they are not like bottle glass. The latter is formulated to work well in forming machines (harden quickly), melt and stiffen quickly, have low melt viscosity and resist milkiness and crystallization on solidification. The chemistries to accomplish this have adequate resistance to leaching and adequate durability for a single or few uses. A stoneware glaze melt needs to be much more viscous (to stay put on vertical surfaces). And, it must have a much lower thermal expansion (to match common clay bodies). And, it must resist crystallization more much (since it cools slowly). Fortunately, meeting these needs brings along big benefits: Greater durability, hardness and resistance to leaching. Common target formulas express typical oxide formulas of glazes. Stoneware glazes and bottle glass share a common trait: They have about the same amount of SiO2. But the similarity ends there, stoneware glazes have:
-High Al2O3. Three to five times more! It is the key oxide to producing durable glass. And it stiffens the melt (that disqualifies high levels from bottle glass).
-The same fluxes (CaO, MgO, K2O, Na2O). But they distribute very differently (half the CaO, half to one third the KNaO, much more MgO). Other fluxes like SrO, Li2O are also common.
-Low KNaO (which they call R2O). In glazes it produces crazing, 5% is a typical maximum. But bottle glass can have double or triple that (the high thermal expansion is not an issue and its cheap source materials supply lots of melting power).
-B2O3 melter. It is expensive but can be justified because the glaze is just a thin layer. Glazes at the low end of the stoneware range have 5% or more boron.
The ceramic bottles shown here are made from a dark burning stoneware, the glaze is GA6-B. On the left is the same glaze on a porcelain mug. For the above reasons this glaze is more durable and leach resistant that regular bottle glass.
What is depicted here doesn't happen with ceramic beer bottles. They do the talking. They talk about how we should be manufacturing our own stuff locally. They remind us that we make beer here so we should also make the bottles. They tell us we should take pride in things we can manufacture ourselves. That we should use local raw materials rather than importing them. Glass bottles are just a container, ceramic bottles elevate beer, they bring sustainability and style to beer drinking. Ceramic bottles bring local craftsmen to your beer experience - potters can make them. Ordinary glass will always be just ordinary glass, but ceramic bottles bring a world of aesthetic possibilities to this basic part of our culture.
This project is a testament to my wife's patience with me using her kitchen as a mold-making shop. Most of the tools I need are there. A nice stable table to run two 3D printers, lots of room and plugins, electrical appliances, utensils and supplies of every type, good lighting. And pleasant company!
I have already poured PMC-746 rubber into 3D printed block molds and have printed and put in place stabilizers to hold the rubber in place. Embeds are in place on both the bottle base and bottom mold (upper right). The flexibility of this rubber is amazing, it makes possible extraction of the plaster base, although with difficulty. It also preserves the embossed logo on the foot. This is version 4 (version 5 will have a shallow base piece and modified sliding natches).
The $5 garage sale mixer does not pull bubbles to the surface so I just pull them up by counter-stirring with a serving spoon. A common sense workflow (never pouring any down the sink, cleaning everything in a settling bucket) makes this no problem in the kitchen.
Something I love about 3D parametricCAD is how a drawing can evolve to be both simpler and better. While my version 2 drawing had about 20 steps, this one is down to nine. No more ribs, no offsets or mirrors in the sketches, no double-revolves and no seams across the mount ads. Printing will be dramatically faster. The quality of the side rails is now the key factor in final mold accuracy (these stabilize it while filling with plaster from the back).
I now draw the simplest repeatable shape: A one-quarter slice. Step 5 cuts the bottle profile from the solid block extruded in step 4. The preceding steps were a sketch of the bottle and block outline and a plane and sketch for the pad. Steps 6 and 7 are the extrusion and corner rounding of the pad cutout (near the rim). The last two steps mirror this quarter upward to create the block and then shell it to hollow the back side.
The drawing is now fully parametrically resizable, I have taken advantage of that to make a stubby bottle test. Neck spline points are now spaced vertically as a percentage of the neck height parameter - set at "70" here. The body and neck heights are separately set now so the full height is now a driven dimension - it is 146 here.
Which is the glass beer bottle among these ceramic ones?
One hundred years ago Medalta Potteries made beer bottles (until glass ones took over by 1930). I am making master molds to create them again (using the slip-casting process). These are beyond cool! There is a glass one in this group, I'll bet you cannot pick it out! These are stoneware and fired at 2200F. The clay is dark-colored (like Coffee Clay) and the glaze is actually made using 80% of a clay we mine in this area (it is called Alberta Slip), it is extremely durable and has a chemistry akin to that of the glass in a regular beer bottle.
This time I printed the block mold, rather than the case mold, in six pieces on my consumer 3D printer.
Top: I printed the two halves upright (creating them in the slicer rather than Fusion 360). Because the print lines run concentric the quality is so much better than the previous version printed flat. The ribbing inside made the halves strong so they did not go out of shape when filled with plaster (to give them weight).
Second: The mold halves were simply laid against each other - they mated perfectly (and stayed in place because they are full of plaster). The four rails were then clamped in place.
Third: The PLA was soaped (using Murphy's Oil Soap) and rubber poured in (Smooth-On PMC-746). The next day it easily pulled out.
Fourth: The finished rubber case mold. The sides are pretty flabby so I make them rigid using the four rails (placed upside down).
Right: Using a plaster mold created from this rubber case mold I slip-casted a bottle using my L4768D recipe, glazed it with GA6-B and fired it at cone 6.
The center bottle is a standard glass one, the other two are ceramic, cast out of my version 1 plaster mold. The stopper fits perfectly. The clay is PlainsmanM370 + 10% raw umber, it fires black. The glaze is GA6-B, an amber transparent that produces a deep glass-like effect over the dark burning body. They were fired using the C6DHSCfiring schedule. These bottles are a testament to how 3D printing and 3D design now make it possible for even casual potters to make pieces never before practical or even possible.
The commercial bottle on the right is 25cm high. These stopper mechanisms are a commodity item, millions are made and a wide range of bottles work with them. They are easy to find online and go by a variety of names (e.g. "Grolsch style flip top stoppers", "Swingtop Grolsch style bottle cages", "Porcelainswing top cap").
The slip cast bottle is on the left - this one is leather hard, recently extracted from a mold. It is made using a black-burning stoneware, the L4768D recipe. As a starting point, I used water/Darvan proptions outlined in the "Casting Recipe" section of the M370 data sheet. By the time this is fired it will be 10% smaller and will match the glass one on the right. The lugs are positioned to work well with swing-top stoppers.
Making the Stopper Holes on a Leather Hard Beer Bottle
I use an 11/64" drill bit to make the pivot holes in the lugs (at the leather hard stage after extraction from the mold). Of course, they must be centered and deep enough to hold the swing mechanism (but not so deep they punch through the wall). I find that pressing a pea-sized ball of clay into the lugs (inside the neck), held in place by slip, thickens the wall sufficiently. The wall thickness shown here was sufficient to make the holes without thinkening the lugs, but it results in a bottle that is too heavy. If you find a way to automate this process, please let me know.
This drawing of a beer bottle demonstrates parametrics
This is Fusion 360. The profile was drawn and various measurements parameterized (shown in the listbox on the lower right). That means the measurements were given names (e.g. body_diameter, thickness). This makes it possible to change aspects of the geometry of this shape by just editing the parameters. If you are experienced in 3D CAD you will be able to see this drawing is actually beginner-level, I have not fully defined and constrained it. For example, I cannot change the height or width and have it maintain the shape when it redraws (to do the z-axis value of the vertical center-points of the curves need to be defined as a percentage of the neck height, and the neck vs body height proportion also needs to be set). I should also have placed the center of the lip at the origin. Further, it does not need to be hollow, it should be a solid body enclosed by the desired profile.
