Guinness® Collectors Club

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The Managing Director of GUINNESS Exports Ltd was a master at promotional advertising for his time and quite an extraordinary man. He initiated the idea to drop sealed bottles of Foreign GUINNESS from ships at various points around the world's oceans. The bottles contained messages for those lucky enough to find them washed up on the shore!

During the summer of 1954, 50,000 bottles were dropped in the first and lesser of the two drops undertaken in that year. A numbered greetings message was enclosed which asked the finder to tear-off a part of the message and return it to GUINNESS Exports, reporting the location and date of the find. Many did so and each received a personal reply and a small memento of the event. Some bottles were found in Liverpool docks, others from the Bahamas, Tahiti, the Azores and Mexico. The success of the idea led to the decision to treble the scale of the drop to be done in the bicentenary year of 1959.

In 1959, 150,000 specially embossed bottles were dropped from 30 freighters in the Atlantic to be targeted to make landfall on the eastern seaboard of the USA and Canada.

Unlike the first drop these specially made bottles had the outline of the North American continent on them. Rather than just a single message inside, they each contained a King Neptune scroll, a letter, a gold label and instructions on how to make the bottle into a table lamp. The 45 bottles per carton were dropped overboard and the carton was made so as to disintegrate in sea water.

The bottles are still coming to light even today....having worked loose from the ever-melting Arctic ice!