# New beer bottle closure discovered: Morgenstern



## Skoda (Feb 28, 2021)

Hi all,

One of the (few) highlights of last year for me was a bit of research I dove into on a bottle I had acquired several years back. It's a circa early 1870's era Valentine Loewer Lager Bier out of NYC with a fully intact and functional closure (sans the rubber being hard as a rock), despite the rust and pitting. When I first got it I identified it as a Kutscher closure and called it a day, but looking at it again I realized it was an absolute misidentification. There was nothing on the sodasandbeers database that quite matched mine, so off to google patents I went! I narrowed my search terms between the late 1865-1878 and went through every single "bottle stopper" patent I could find, and after about an hour digging through them, I believe I found it! It is assigned to H. Morgenstern and the patent drawings are near identical- the only difference being the lack of a hinge on the side of the bail without the clip. The date of the patent matches the era of the bottle AND it's inventor was out of NYC, so despite the slight difference I'm pretty confident this is a match. Morgenstern has a few other patents under his name but it appears that he died in the late 1870's as he's listed as "deceased" on an 1877 patent. The assignee on that one is H.W. Putnam (_the _H.W. Putnam), which is a pretty incredible connection. I'm going to be forwarding this info to the sodasandbeers site when I finally put a big email together, but I figured I'd share this here as well!


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## bottles_inc (Feb 28, 2021)

Wow, fantastic find! As an NY collector I'm green with envy. That's top shelf material for sure. Where on earth did you find it? Is it one of those moonshot thrift store finds I always here about but never experience?


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## hemihampton (Feb 28, 2021)

Nice Bottle, Congrats. His Brewery lasted from 1871-1883 with that name & location. LEON.


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## Skoda (Feb 28, 2021)

bottles_inc said:


> Wow, fantastic find! As an NY collector I'm green with envy. That's top shelf material for sure. Where on earth did you find it? Is it one of those moonshot thrift store finds I always here about but never experience?



It came up in a bottle lot at my old local auction house in Bristol NH. It was with like 10 various bottles and they were all low-end or worthless except for this one. Someone must have dug it up in NY and it ended up a few states over eventually.



hemihampton said:


> Nice Bottle, Congrats. His Brewery lasted from 1871-1883 with that name & location. LEON.



Oh cool, I didn't know that! 12 years isn't a bad run at all


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## ROBBYBOBBY64 (Mar 1, 2021)

Nice addition. I love odd closures. Many on this site also do. It looks like a variation of this type. The picture is slightly different than the patent. What do you all think? Great bottle.
ROBBYBOBBY64.


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## saratogadriver (Mar 1, 2021)

ROBBYBOBBY64 said:


> Nice addition. I love odd closures. Many on this site also do. It looks like a variation of this type. The picture is slightly different than the patent. What do you all think? Great bottle.
> ROBBYBOBBY64.





I bet the loop on the hinge side was an improvement over the original patent with a solid piece on that side.  Bet that solid piece wore out quickly and broke...

Jim G


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## ROBBYBOBBY64 (Mar 1, 2021)

saratogadriver said:


> I bet the loop on the hinge side was an improvement over the original patent with a solid piece on that side.  Bet that solid piece wore out quickly and broke...
> 
> Jim G


That's what i thought also. It is definitely the same idea but obviously an improvement. Looks like the solid design may have binded up when you open it. Not smooth, you know. Good observation Jim G.
ROBBYBOBBY64.


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## Skoda (Mar 1, 2021)

saratogadriver said:


> I bet the loop on the hinge side was an improvement over the original patent with a solid piece on that side.  Bet that solid piece wore out quickly and broke...
> 
> Jim G


Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. Definitely an improvement over having a single bent piece!


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## Palani (Mar 3, 2021)

Great find and very nice bottle!


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## butchndad (Mar 3, 2021)

great bottle
very minor note: Morgenstern's attorneys for the patent application were  Van Santvoord & Hauff, of Times Building, Park Row, New York


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## willong (Mar 3, 2021)

Nice bottle, not to mention the research "go with."


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## cor3y7 (Mar 3, 2021)

Nice detective work and great looking item!


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## 604Greg (Mar 3, 2021)

Awesome and good investigation on the history from you for the rest of us!


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## ronkusa (Mar 3, 2021)

Great find, nice work!


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## blobtop (Mar 16, 2021)

Here are two bottles from the same brewer 






Valentine Loewer shown in the original post in this thread.  The larger one is embossed with Lager Bier and the smaller embossed with Weiss Bier.  The Lager has the Morgenstern closure as shown in the patent drawing above.  The smaller has fragments of a closure similar to the one that started this thread.  It seems Loewer used both stoppers.  The research I have seems to indicate that the evolution from one to the other was the reverse of the speculation in the above comments in this thread.  It shows the closure on the Weiss Bier was dated 1873 and the one on the Lager Bier was dated 1874.  At this stage we can only speculate on the relative strength and convenience of each design.


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## hemihampton (Mar 16, 2021)

Not sure I ever seen those type of Closures, real oddball looking. Thanks for the Pics. LEON.


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## Skoda (Mar 16, 2021)

blobtop said:


> Here are two bottles from the same brewer View attachment 221413View attachment 221414View attachment 221415Valentine Loewer shown in the original post in this thread.  The larger one is embossed with Lager Bier and the smaller embossed with Weiss Bier.  The Lager has the Morgenstern closure as shown in the patent drawing above.  The smaller has fragments of a closure similar to the one that started this thread.  It seems Loewer used both stoppers.  The research I have seems to indicate that the evolution from one to the other was the reverse of the speculation in the above comments in this thread.  It shows the closure on the Weiss Bier was dated 1873 and the one on the Lager Bier was dated 1874.  At this stage we can only speculate on the relative strength and convenience of each design.



Wow, this is incredible to see! Thank you for posting these. I can totally see the other version as being a potential improvement with how sturdy that single bent metal band looks. Very very cool that both versions went into some degree of production and were used by this brewer over such a relatively short period of time.


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## blobtop (Mar 17, 2021)

I don't remember where I found the bottles, but I try to collect different closure types.  It's great we have this web page to share our discoveries!


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