Damn those Amstel bottles

For those homebrewers out there, you may know that the acquiring of bottles can be an interesting decision to make, since buying *just* bottles can be a bit over-expensive, so I opted to (along with my family and their friends) just drink a little over two cases of beer in the last month or two and use the Papazian method of soaking the bottles in an ammonia solution overnight to get rid of the labels. After the overnight ammonia bath, every bottle of beer that I had drunk was lying in the cooler with the (paper) labels pretty much already falling off. HOWEVER, my parents have a liking for light beer, which I respect and understand. In a quest to buy them a quality light beer with a removable label that was not a twist-off, I suggested Amstel Light, which turned out to be a bad choice. Amstel bottles have plastic labels that are basically seamlessly superglued onto the bottles. The impermeable plastic makes it impossible for the ammonia solution to wear down the glue and make the label fall off, so needless to say, I had a bitch of a time killing my fingernails to peel the labels off. They are now soaking to get the rest of the glue off. The moral of this story, kids, is to buy bottles with paper labels when you plan to use them for homebrewing. No matter, at least I now have 50+ beautiful brown bottles ready to fill with DELICIOUS ALE come this weekend. But I am now totally turned off of Amstel.

Sidenote: there was a sixer of Sam Adams Light in the mix, and that has paper labels (and tastes much better than Amstel). Should have just stuck with that, goshdurnit.