Seltzertopia was extensively quoted in a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine. Entitled, “The Intoxicating History of the Canned Cocktail,” it focuses on how “since the 1890s, the premade cocktail has flip-flopped from novelty item to kitschy commodity—but the pandemic has sales surging.” The journalist, Liza Weisstuch, focused on one of my favorite but least referenced part of the book: the rise of the U.S. bottling industry as document in, and promoted by, The National Bottlers’ Gazette. Read the full piece here or check out the excerpt below.

The bottled drink boom was possible, in part, thanks to the concurrent expansion of the bottling industry. According to Barry Joseph, author of Seltzertopia: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary Drink, the number of bottlers grew from a little more than 100 to nearly 500 between the 1859 and the 1879 censuses. By 1889, that number grew 300 percent to nearly 1,400. The bottle was here to stay.

Joseph details the origins of The National Bottlers’ Gazette, an illustrated monthly journal founded in 1882 and run by printer William B. Keller. At that time, Joseph writes, saloons accounted for 70 percent of bottle sales. Keller aimed to unify the industry in the hopes that liquor and soft drink companies could join forces to eliminate rampant problems like bottle thievery. Bottles were meant to be cleaned, returned and refilled and typically had a lifecycle of five or six usages, but devious types found a way to exploit that. “At the same time, there was great incentive for bottlers to, essentially, steal the discarded bottles of their rivals, remove any sign of their previous owner, and then reuse them or even sell the stolen bottles at a discount to bottlers in other locations,” Joseph writes. Worse yet, the scoundrels would sell them back to the original bottlers.

But as testament to the rapid growth and, consequently, competition, rivalries between soft-drink and alcohol sectors broke out. “Call off your dogs of war, Mr. Brewer;” Keller writes, referring to the alcohol segment of the industry, “for just as sure as fate, if you and your ilk do not desist and abstain, hereafter, from slandering and libeling soda water, it will as surely lead to a trade war such as never before existed.”