This is a true attic find and a genuine opportunity to own a piece of Scottish brewing history. This paper beer label was found with others in the attic of an 18th century cottage in a small Scottish village. The cottage is now a private house but is known to have been a public house in the late 19th century. As well as beer bottle labels the cottage has also yielded such gems as old beer crates and trade trade price lists for beer and wine.
This beer label dates back to a time when the Scottish breweries only bottled beer for the export market. Beer for the home market was generally delivered to the publicans in casks and then bottled on the premises. To distinguish the contents of each bottle, publicans would generally have a stock of printed labels and would apply these to the beer bottles with glue. At our property it is evident that many items were stored on an upper level accessed by a small ladder. The building was later modernised and a proper ceiling was installed at which point the upper level became an attic. Obviously when the other labels were disposed of in the years after the cottage became a private house a small number were overlooked and remained hidden in the roof void.
This label has been reliably dated to before 1907. It was found wrapped in a copy of the Scotsman Newspaper newspaper dated May 25th 1898 and was bundled together with labels for R. Henderson & Co of Alloa which can be accurately dated from the design of the label. We also know that after 1910 McEwan's, R. Henderson, William Ross and the other Scottish breweries that had previously bottled only for export began to bottle for the home market. So the publican's stock of labels would no longer have been required.
When these beer labels were first stored away, Queen Victoria was still on the throne, the Boer War was in progress, the Ford Motor Company didn't exist and the first flight of an aeroplane by the Wright Brothers was still some years in the future. The labels have lain forgotten in the attic through two World Wars, the Kennedy Assassination, Man's first flight to the Moon, Watergate, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and numerous other world events which have shaped our history.
Although this label has never been used prosepctive buyers should note it has been hidden away in a very dirty and dusty environment for many years and therefore the condition can hardly be described as pristine.
