Why do brewers bother with green glass?

[Jono]

I usually avoid any beer in green glass bottles....due to the skunk quality that green glass is famous for....almost every beer in green glass reeks of skunk...yes, eventually is fades once opened...but why ruin a good beer with a poor bottle? I realize appearance is part of marketing....but can't they fix the light damage issue? Clear glass too...

http://realbeer.com/library/beerbreak/archives/beerbreak20001221.php

"The smell is the product of the chemical reaction that takes place in the bottle when bright light strikes the hops, creating what's technically known as "light struck" beer. The reaction is stronger with paler and hoppier beers. The resulting chemical is identical to that in a skunk's defense system, and light-struck beer puts off one of the most powerful aromas around."

Moosehead is famous for this...it is an otherwise ok beer...but that smell ruins it for me.

[jeff]

Personally, I have come to associate the "skunk" as a normal ingredient in most German Lagers available here, and actually am somewhat fond of it. The same is not true for green or clear-glass domestic beers. Blah!

[mier]

According to Heineken the green bottle is commercially more attractive.That`s why their export is green while we have the brown bottles here.Though both Heineken and Grolsch have some green bottlings on the homemarket,not that popular.

Eric.

[craigthom]

Remember when Grolsch switched from brown to green twenty years ago. They were up front about it being for marketing reasons.

To this day when we are driving along and smell skunk road kill my uncle says, "who opened a Heineken?"

Miller says they got around the skunk with clear bottles by specially breeding hops that don't do that. I visited their lab in Milwaukee once to work on a piece of Agilent (formerly HP) lab equipment. For skunkiness they still use people, since some people have sensitive enough sense of smell to be able to pick out lower levels than the gas chromatograph.