Hawai‘i didn’t have a bottle-manufacturing plant during the nineteenth century, and all glassware needed by Island brewers, soft-drink manufacturers, and other bottlers accordingly had to be shipped in from abroad. “Hawai‘i’s first embossed bottles,” according to bottle historians Rex Elliot and Stephen Gould, “were pointy-ended greenish sodas imported by Ulrich Alting, a forward looking German merchant, back in 1851. Embossed whiskey bottles for C. L. Richards & Co. followed about seven years later, with a batch of blob-top sodas blown for George C. McLean arriving seven years after that.”

By Robert C. Schmitt