I’m late to the game on this month’s edition of The Session (Beer Blogging Friday), which is what happens when it falls on a holiday weekend and I have the Friday off. (Happy late Independence Day!) This month’s Session was hosted by Deep Beer, with a topic on breweriana under the title “Bottles, Caps and Other Beer Detritus“:

The focus is on the liquid inside the bottle, can or keg, and rightly so. What about all the other products necessary to bring that beer to you? What about the things that are necessary but are easily overlooked and discarded.

Detritus, according to one definition in the Merriam Webster Dictionary is “miscellaneous remnants : odds and ends”. While the number and quality of our beer choices has certainly improved over the recent decade, have you paid any attention to the rest of the package. Those things we normally glance over and throw away when we have poured and finished our beer. These are sometimes works of art in themselves. Bottle caps, labels, six-pack holders, even the curvature of the bottle. For this month’s The Session theme, I’m asking contributors to share their thoughts on these things, the tangential items to our obsession. Do you have any special fetish with bottle caps, know of someone that is doing creative things with packaging, have a beer bottle or coaster collection.

Back at Session #52 we had the topic Collectibles & Breweriana, and then for Session #55 we discussed Label, Coaster, and Cap Art, so this isn’t really the first time we’ve touched on this topic. For #52 I wrote:

I don’t collect much in the way of breweriana: I have some odds and ends, including a few pieces of wall art (posters and signs), a small collection of coasters, glassware which I use regularly, T-shirts, and a small collection of cans and bottles which gets re-evaluated periodically.

But I do pay attention to that detritus and packaging and enjoy the art behind the beer, and my daughter has been collecting my bottle caps for awhile now. And we have a ton of old six-pack holders that get re-used for carrying random bottles of beer and homebrew, but I don’t pay much more attention to those than that. In my current collection (which, frankly, needs culling again) I have the following:

Plus other odds and ends. But then you should see my beer collection…