Miniature Liquor Bottles

Baker sits at his desk, surrounded by his bottle collection on April 7, 2012.  The number of bottles often overwhelms and surprises visitors. (Katie Cowell/J2150S News)

            “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” would be an apt theme song for Bill Baker.  Even though the bottle count in the lyrics is definitely too low, “4,165 Bottles” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

            Baker’s expansive collection of miniature liquor bottles takes over nearly all the wall space in his home office.

“It’s always great when someone walks in here and they’ve never seen it,” Baker said.  “They’re thinking it’s 40 bottles or something like that.  Then they turn the corner.”

Baker holds the first bottle he ever collected.  His collection started when he was 10 years old and increased rapidly throughout his college years at Clemson University. (Katie Cowell/J2150S News)

            Baker started collecting miniature bottles at the age of 10 when he and his family vacationed in Dolphin Island, Ala.  At the time, restaurants in Southern states were required by law to serve alcohol in single-serving miniature bottles and open the bottles in front of customers, which allowed people to see that they weren’t being cheated.

As a young kid, Baker had no interest in the bottles’ contents, and used them to play in the sand at the beach instead.  It wasn’t until later that he discovered he could collect them.  He still has the first bottle – a cubed-shaped glass bottle that contains Lochan Ora Liqueur.

Baker’s collection is now up to a grand total of 4,165 and only continues to grow.

“I don’t walk by a liquor store, pretty much, when I won’t wander in,” Baker said.

Baker buys 20-40 bottles throughout the year when he’s traveling, another 100 or so at the annual Midwest Miniature Bottle Collectors trade show held in St. Louis, and then a handful are given to him as gifts.  Over the course of a year, he expands his collection by about 150 bottles.

Baker attends the Midwest Miniature Bottle Collectors' show each April.  The MMBC show is the largest of its kind in America. (Katie Cowell/J2150S News)

Baker is the show chairman for the Midwest Miniature Bottle Collectors, the largest miniature bottle club in America.  A crowd of 300 collectors fills the large ballroom of the Sheraton Westport Hotel at the end of each April for their trade show.  At any given show, anywhere from 9-14 countries are represented, Baker said.

Most common bottles cost anywhere from $.50-$15 each.  Some collectors trade and sell their bottles, but Baker prefers to not to worry about the value; he focuses on the fun of the collecting.

“What I have in it and what it’s worth are two different things,” he said.

Sentimental value is worth more to most collectors than the monetary value, Baker said.  Because that's the case, it’s hard to put a satisfactory price on whole collections, and even harder to find a buyer as most collectors own half of the bottles already.

Although many people collect exclusively tequilas, scotches, vodkas or another kind of liquor, Baker seeks out bottles of any sort that he finds interesting.

A bottle filled with worms sits next to its more conventional brothers.  The Dos Gusanos bottle was supposed to contain two worms, but a manufacturing error occurred. (Katie Cowell/J2150S News)

Of his thousands of bottles, it’s hard to pick a favorite, Baker said.  There are some that he always shows to visitors though.  Among those: bottles with real vipers or scorpions inside, the tequila bottle that’s filled to the brim with worms, his most expensive crystal bottle with 100-year-old brandy inside (it’s worth about $400), a bottle containing oil from the 1989 Alaskan oil spill, shotgun shell-shaped bottles, light bulbs with alcohol inside, Jim Beam bottles he distributed to friends and family to announce the birth of his kids, and tricky ceramic pieces in the shape of cigars, an airplane and a pistol – all that hold some sort of liquor inside.

Since Baker has been collecting since he was a child, he said that his wife knew what she was getting into when she married him.

Baker gave bottles of his favorite drink to friends and family as birth announcements.  People liked the bottles more than the traditional cigar, he said. (Katie Cowell/J2150S News)

The eldest of Baker’s daughters, Mary, 17, commented on the quirkiness of her family.  “I have a dad who collects mini bottles and a mom who is one of 14 kids,” she said.  Life is rarely “normal” around the Baker house.

Although his family accepts Baker’s affinity for mini bottles and enjoys receiving them as gifts (he gave Mary an Ebenezer Scrooge bottle after she performed in A Christmas Carol and an owl-shaped bottle because she loves Harry Potter): “They give me a lot of trouble for it,” Baker admitted with a laugh.
“Sometime when I’m dead and gone,” he said, “[my family will] have to figure out what to do with the bottles.  Maybe they’ll open them up and have one hell of a party.”

UPDATE:  Bill Baker attended this year's Midwest Miniature Bottles Collectors' show the weekend of April 19 and added 110 bottles to his collection.  This brings the grand total to 4,275 bottles.

Bill Baker stands in front of his miniature bottle collection on April 7, 2012.  He said that he's getting more and more picky about the bottles he chooses to buy because he's quickly running out of shelf space.  (Katie Cowell/J2150S News)

People have been collecting miniature liquor bottles for decades...click here to see an article in the Milwaukee Journal from 1943!