The Story of the Fake Berkshire Ginger Beer Bottle

On the 4th May 2016, I received a ginger beer through the post that I had bought on ebay.  I had only been collecting for 6 months at this point and so nothing seemed unusual to me.  It was a T. Weaver internal screw ginger beer which I assumed was common and at most worth about £5 to any collector the same as any other T. Weaver ginger beer bottle.

Anyway, I received a phone call, on 18th Febrary 2017, from Greg Huntley who can of course only be described as the authority on Berkshire Ginger Beers.  He had looked at my website and wanted to know if he could have the internal screw version of the T. Weaver of Reading ginger beer as he did not have it.  I was quite surprised by the phone call as the bottle had been on my website since I bought it and the bottle had just sat on the shelf with the rest of my Berkshire ginger beers until then.  As he is a good friend of mine and his collection is more like a museum piece than anything else I agreed that he could have it off of me.  It was the right thing to do of course and so I arranged to meet him at the Berkhampstead bottle show on 19th February 2017.

Greg did his usual thing and turned up at the bottle show with loads of ginger beers that I did not have in my collection.  Yes I had only been collecting for around 17 months at this point but Greg always has the knack of finding me new ginger beers that I do not have - how nice is that for me ?!! - what a brilliant friend to have!

Anyway after showing me all the one's he had for me, I fetched the internal screw version of the T. Weaver of Reading to add to his collection.  With a proud glorious smile I handed him the bottle.  He has not added a new Berkshire ginger beer to his collection for years, unfortunately, and so we were both quite excited at the prospect.

When I gave him the ginger beer, it took him about 5 seconds to make a comment - he said that it was a fake!  I couldn't believe what I was hearing.  The glory just drained out of me and a hint of sickness hit me.  He showed me the area just under the lip where 2 bottles had been joined together to form one bottle with an internal screw.  It had been well done and must have taken a good while to do.  It had been joined together and sprayed over to make it look like an original bottle.

He then told me that he had dug hundreds and hundreds of T. Weaver bottles and none of them were internal screw closure - they were all cork.  He handed the bottle to another of our friends Stu Badcock who also confirmed quickly that it was a fake.  Quite why somebody would want to fake this bottle is beyond me, but there you go !!

Unfortunately I now have to remove it from the "Known Berkshire Ginger Beers" page of my website and delete it from my collection on this website!  My apologies to Greg for getting his hopes up.  In my defence I never really looked at the bottle in a good light to notice that it may have been fake and of course didn't know it was an impossible bottle as I have no experience of this ginger beer bottle to know that it was only ever known to be produced as a cork closure bottle.

The bottle in question is as below.  Would it have fooled you too?

click on images below to enlarge:

Deconstruction of the Fake Berkshire Ginger Beer Bottle

Today on 5th April 2017 I decided to partially deconstruct the ginger beer bottle in question to discover exactly what the person did to be able to fake this ginger beer bottle.

So, I got my penknife and started scratching away as part of the surface of the bottle to see what happened.   Obviously I knew that any spray paint would flake off with the glaze remaining in tact.  The pictures below represent what I have now done to the bottle for proof that it is indeed a fake !!

click on images below to enlarge:

The results were unbelievable!  Why would somebody have done this to a bottle - deliberately faking to parts of a bottle that can not and do not exist to anyone's knowledge.

Notice the different colours - I only scratched a segment off of the bottle for comparison to see what had been done.  Clearly the originaly top and bottom of the bottle did not even match in colour.  The spray paint used was too golden and a clue to the person that did this - from the colour of the fill used to join the two parts, it looks like, wall plaster was used !!

Thank goodness for experts who can spot these things !!  I am only sad that the bottle did not really exist and embarrassed that I showed to an expert assuming that it did exist !!