🍼 Bottle

Bottle is a glass or plastic container with a neck for bottling milk. A milk bottle is a glass container, usually one pint (568 ml), in which milk was delivered and sold. One from the 1980s in Museum Wales stands 18 cm high with a 7 cm base.

Museum bottles double as billboards. The Unigate bottle, made by Dairy Crest, carries an advert for Country Life English Butter. The London Express Dairy pint from 1985 to 1995 advertises Kellogg's Corn Flakes. It is 183 mm tall and weighs 246 g.

Glass is clear, and milk does not like light. Cornell University's Milk Quality Improvement Program kept 2% milk under 2000 lux, about what a shop's dairy case gives. In roughly two hours half of the teens and adults tasted an off-flavour. Vitamin A losses showed up after 2 hours in skimmed milk, 4 in reduced-fat and 16 in whole. Paperboard cartons normally protect enough, and plain HDPE plastic blocks little UV. The usual fix is pigmented plastic.

In the EU, glass packaging for food falls under the general food-contact rules, Regulation (EC) No 1935/2004, with good manufacturing practice set out in Regulation 2023/2006.

Size separates a bottle from a milk can: a pint is 568 ml, while a can holds tens of litres. It differs from a wine bottle by what is inside, and from a kefir or baked-milk bottle mostly by the label. If you buy milk in glass, keep it in the dark of the fridge, not on the windowsill. Bottling and delivery of milk in such bottles went through the milkman.