Harvey's switching to 500ml bottles

As some eagle-eyed Harvey’s bottle beer patrons may have noticed, many of our beers, most notably our Christmas Ale, were only available in 500ml bottles at the end of 2022. This leads us into the announcement that all Harvey’s beers available in bottle will now be packaged in a 500ml format. The two beers excluded from this at the moment are our Imperial Extra Stout and Prince of Denmark.

Driving this change is the supply, or lack thereof, of 275ml bottles which we find harder to come by each year, so this switch makes the most sense for the future of our packaged beer production.

We are committed to being the only brewer in the UK* that uses returnable bottles, and the 500ml bottles can continue to be returned to us at the brewery for reuse. We estimate that our bottles will journey 4 or 5 trips in and out of the Brewery in a lifespan. In addition to this, the crates for our 275ml bottles have been sent to be reground and recycled into new crates for our 500ml bottles.

We are also pleased to highlight that as well as our reusable bottles and crates, all of our products are reused or packaged in such a way to make them sustainable:

• All cans and mini-kegs are 100% recyclable
• Stainless steel casks are sent back to the brewery to be washed and reused
• All of our online packaging consists of cardboard, paper tape and biodegradable packing filler

Find out more about our green commitments here.

*As far as we know we are still the only brewer in the UK with a Returnable Bottle Scheme in place, but we would be delighted to hear if there any others!