Arts and Crap - Beer Label Scrapbooking

I am a collector by nature. You either are or you aren't. So those who are not collectors may not understand this. It really is an obsession. I have to acquire stuff. I have collected all different kinds of stuff in my life. Comic books, baseball cards (and I don't even like baseball), coins, action figures, and various other pieces of crap. One of the things that has accumulated over the years from all the different beers I have tried are beer bottles. I have tried to save a beer bottle from every different beer I have sampled. Some admittedly not worth saving, yet there they are. Right now I have on display over 250 bottles, with about another 200 in storage in the basement. As you can guess there is a space problem.

To help alleviate some of the excess storage I started removing the labels and saving them in a scrapbook. It was a real Martha Stewart moment.

 The big challenge is getting the labels off the bottle without tearing it. Depending on the brewery and what kind of adhesive sometimes they come right off, but most are kind of tricky. I have tried soaking the bottles in hot water with a little dish soap with some success. Once again it depends on the paper used for the label and the adhesives used. Some of the hardest labels are ones with metallic foil. Those have a tendency to disintegrate.

My curiosity got the better of me when I saw something called Label-Off over by the wine accessories. For $6 you get 10 5x7" adhesive strips. Worth a try.

Applied over the label, it evenly distributes the surface tension across the label when you pull the strip off. It peels the top layer of the label off and leaves the adhesive on the bottle. Ten bottles down, 200 to go. Pretty easy to use, though I think it's a little pricey for what you get. I'm wondering if a couple of strips of packing tape will get the same result.