If you like your bottles early, honest, and unapologetically hand-made—this one checks all the boxes.
Offered here is a gorgeous late-19th-century hand-blown blob top beer or soda/mineral water bottle from Kingston, New Jersey (Middlesex County), embossed for JOS. CATELLI. This is the classic “champagne beer” cylindrical form, tall and elegant, with thick glass, a confident stance, and that unmistakable soft aquamarine color collectors chase.
Embossing & Identification
The front features a bold oval slug plate reading:
THE PROPERTY OF
JOS. CATELLI
J.C.
KINGSTON, N.J.
At the heel, the bottle proudly declares its purpose and survival instinct:
REGISTERED / THIS BOTTLE / NOT TO BE SOLD
Flip it over and you’ll find mold number “201” on the underside—an internal factory identifier typical of regional glasshouses supplying bottlers throughout New Jersey in the late 1800s.
The bottle retains its original tooled round blob top lip, formed hot and finished by hand—no machine-made shortcuts here.
Size & Color
Height: approx. 9 1/8 inches
Base diameter: just over 2 1/2 inches
Color: Pleasant aqua / light aquamarine, with excellent clarity and life
Condition
This bottle is in excellent collector condition:
Never appears to have been buried
Clean interior with no staining or haze
Moderate case wear consistent with honest handling and age
A few very tiny bruises/nicks confined to the heel area, typical for bottles that actually lived a working life
No cracks, no major chips, no repairs
Simply put: this is as nice as you’re likely to see for a Kingston-area blob top.
About the Bottler & the Era
Joseph Catelli represents the wave of small, local bottlers who flourished in New Jersey during the 1880s–1890s, when beer, soda water, and mineral water were distributed hyper-locally. Bottles like this weren’t packaging—they were company property, reused endlessly, tracked fiercely, and embossed to discourage “accidental borrowing.”
Kingston sat along important regional routes between New Brunswick, Princeton, and the Raritan River system—prime territory for taverns, inns, and thirsty laborers. Refrigeration didn’t exist yet. Clean municipal water wasn’t guaranteed. Carbonated beverages were often safer than what came out of the tap.
This bottle was:
Hand-blown in a mold
Finished with a tooled lip
Sealed with a cork and wire or twine
Washed, refilled, and reused until it broke—or survived long enough to land here, nearly 130 years later
Politically, this was post-Civil War America, deep into industrial expansion. Railroads were booming, glasshouses were working around the clock, and New Jersey was one of the epicenters of American bottle production.
No automation. No mass uniformity. Every example has subtle differences—and that’s the charm.
Why This Bottle Matters
Desirable New Jersey origin
Bold, readable embossing
Attractive aqua color
Classic blob top form
Clean, display-worthy condition
Scarcer Kingston attribution, not a big-city common
This is the kind of bottle that anchors a regional collection—or steals attention in a mixed display. It doesn’t shout. It stands there confidently and lets its age do the talking.
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