German bottle cost explodes
Nation’s brewers in a lather, pleading for return of billions of empties now in circulation
Stefan Fritsche, who runs a centuries-old German brewery in Neuzelle, near the Polish border, has seen his natural gas bill jump a startling 400% over the past year. His electricity bill has increased 300%. And he is paying more for barley than ever before.
But the soaring inflation for energy and grains in the wake of the Ukraine war is no match for the biggest challenge facing Fritsche’s brewery, Klosterbrauerei Neuzelle, and others like it across Germany: a severe shortage of beer bottles.
The problem is “unprecedented,” Fritsche said. “The price of bottles has exploded.”
The issue is not so much a lack of bottles. Germany’s roughly 1,500 breweries have up to 4 billion returnable glass bottles in circulation — about 48 for every man, woman and child.
Customers pay a surcharge of 8 euro cents on each bottle, and get that money back when it is returned.
While the returnable-bottle system is climate-friendly and appeals to Germans’ obsession with recycling, it comes with one major problem: getting people to return their empties.
Dragging a crate — or several — of empty bottles back to a store can be a hassle, even if it means getting back the deposit fee. So people tend to let them stack up, in basements or on balconies of apartments, biding their time until they are running out of either space or spare cash.
“It is deadly for small brewers,” Fritsche said. The brewery he runs sells 80% of its beer in bottles — in 2003, a recycling law was expanded to focus on reducing waste in the beverage industry, meaning most beer sold for the domestic market is in returnable bottles, not cans.
Holger Eichele, who heads the national brewers’ association, has taken to the airwaves and social media in recent weeks to urge Germans to return their empty bottles. Beer makers don’t want to run short of bottles as summer approaches.
The war in Ukraine has exacerbated the problem, making it more difficult and expensive for brewers to buy new bottles.
While brewers buy glass from a number of countries in Europe, the war has caused glass factories in Ukraine — an important supplier — to cease operation. Sanctions have cut off supply from Russia and Belarus.
The price of bottles produced elsewhere has reached record levels of 15 to 20 euro cents each, because glassmaking involves huge levels of heat, and energy prices have soared.
Breweries without long-term supply contracts are seeing a price increase of more than 80% for new glass bottles, the German Brewers’ Association said.
A recent article in Germany’s biggest-circulation newspaper, Bild, proclaimed that “Germany is running out of beer bottles,” sending shock waves through the country and leading Eichele to run damage control to prevent panic buying.
“We do not see any danger that beer production will have to be curtailed,” he insisted. “To put it bluntly, supplies to consumers are secure.”
Still, the industry is facing a broad variety of problems, including a shortage of truck drivers and high fuel costs. “It is becoming increasingly difficult for breweries and the beverage trade to maintain the supply chain,” Eichele said.