Down under they have started to sell beer in clear bottles in fridges with lighting... they end up getting skunked....
Suggest brown where possible
I never understood that facination with clear bottles - most importantly, it's way too easy to skunk the beer. Secondary to that, from a marketing perspective they're a nightmare. If they sit on a shelf for any period of time you can see all the dust/dirt that accumulated on the bottle very clearly. Additionally, if you use painted bottles (think Corona) every scratch and scuff mark clearly shows. From a commerical standpoint, it just seems like a nightmare.
I've often found that bottles of Stella Artois and Henieken taste skunked to me and I've attributed it to the green bottles. Yet, I see so many people drinking these that I'm starting to think they're supposed to taste this way. When I was in Belgium a few years back visiting breweries, I thought I might try a bottle of either (or both) and see if there was a difference in taste, but honestly I was having way too much fun trying unique and well-crafted beers at places like
Cantillon,
DDB,
Huyghe,
Brasserie d Vapeur,
Dupont, and
Rodenbach amongst others. I think I found plenty of good reasons to avoid Heiniken or any of the InBev products. :rockin:
(And at the risk of wandering off topic: Yes, as you can imagine, it was an awesome trip. Four of us who used to work together and loved beer went - we left the women at home, and spent 10 days based out of a hotel in Brussels. The trip was centered around being at Cantillon on their open-brew day. We spent the entire day there, from the time they started early in the morning, until the evening when they were pumping the wort in to the open-air copper cooling tray in the attic. Each morning we'd wake up, have a big breakfast, then head out to a WWI or WWII museum, battlefield, something... then after lunch we'd decide we had our culture for the day and hit the brewery(ies) in the town we had driven to. And yes, while a trip to Europe with the girlfriend would have been fun in its own right, I know that by day 3 I'd be hearing, "We're going to ANOTHER brewery?" )