Complete Set of 8 Antique 1920s Budd Beverages Soda Bottle Labels, Newport Bottling Works New Hampshire, Unused NOS Advertising 🥤

🥤 One of Every Flavor a New Hampshire Bottler Ever Poured

This is a complete, matched set of eight different Budd Beverages soda labels — the full flavor line of the Newport Bottling Works of Newport, New Hampshire, gathered together as one collection rather than scattered as loose singles. Golden Ginger Ale, the Budd Beverages flagship, Creamy Root Beer, Imitation Grape Soda, Kola, Lemon & Lime Soda, Cream Soda and Orange Soda: every flavor the little bottling works dressed its bottles in, present and accounted for, each one an original period label that was printed to be pasted on a soda bottle and simply never was. Everything described here is drawn from the labels themselves in the photographs and from the documented history of the company; nothing is invented, and there is no lithographer's imprint on any of the eight — the metallic shine in the artwork is genuine bronze printing ink, not gold leaf.

🏭 The Newport Bottling Works — a Real New Hampshire Story

Budd Beverages was not a national brand and never pretended to be. It began as a family concern in 1916 — a date the company was proud enough of to letter it into the artwork itself, so that "QUALITY SINCE 1916" runs across the bottom of every label in this set. The soda side of the business grew out of that foundation, and by the early 1920s the family was bottling its own line under the Newport Bottling Works name, right there in Newport, in the western hills of New Hampshire. It kept pouring these flavors for the better part of the century before the doors finally closed, the way almost every independent small-town bottler in America eventually closed, squeezed out by the big national labels and the long slow consolidation of the soft-drink trade. What survives of that whole enterprise now is mostly this: the printed paper it dressed its bottles in. To hold all eight flavors at once is to hold the entire public face of a vanished New Hampshire company.

You can read the town right off the sheets. Most of the flavors name the bottler in flowing red script — "Newport Bottling Works, NEWPORT, N.H." — while the flagship and a couple of the fruit flavors carry the corporate form of the name, "Budd's Beverages, Inc., Newport, N.H." The Orange Soda goes one better and adds a second town to its address line, "Newport, N.H., Lebanon, N.H.," a small printed clue that the little works was shipping its orange soda into more than one Upper Valley community. These are the kinds of details that make an old label worth reading closely rather than merely glancing at.

🎨 A Little Masterpiece of Small-Town Deco

Whoever laid out the Budd design understood how to make a five-cent bottle look like a treat. Across the top of every label the word "Budd" sweeps out in a big, confident red script, the tail of the final letter curling under the whole name. Beneath it sits the motif that ties the set together: a wide, shallow coupe glass — the shape of a champagne saucer — printed in warm metallic bronze ink, with a little scatter of rising bubbles and the slogan "THE TASTE TELLS" banded across the bowl.

On the deeper flavors, the Creamy Root Beer especially, that bronze glass genuinely gleams against the cream stock. Below the glass, the flavor announces itself in bold letters, and here the printer let each flavor have its own color personality: the ginger ale and the flagship in cool navy blue, the grape in silvery gray, the root beer in rich brown, the lemon & lime in a fresh green, the kola, cream soda and orange in reds and warm pinks.

Flanking the base are the twin badges of a period bottler — "QUALITY SINCE 1916" and "BEVERAGES 1916" — and a contents line reading "1 Pt. 10 Fl. Ozs." It is unpretentious commercial art, but it is confident, balanced and quietly beautiful, and eight of them lined up read like a single coherent design system rather than eight unrelated scraps.

🌈 The Eight Flavors, One by One

• 🍯 Golden Ginger Ale — the flavor name in navy blue, ingredient notes about carbonated water and caramel color, Newport Bottling Works at the foot.
• 🥂 Budd Beverages (the flagship) — the house label, "BEVERAGES" in blue, signed for Budd's Beverages, Inc. of Newport, N.H.
• 🍺 Creamy Root Beer — brown flavor lettering, the bronze coupe glass at its most brilliant, a genuine period root-beer label.
• 🍇 Imitation Grape Soda — silver-gray lettering, the honest period phrase "Artificial Flavor and Color," Newport Bottling Works below.
• 🥤 Kola — red "KOLA," a small-town answer to the national cola giants, carbonated with kola flavor and caramel color.
• 🍋 Lemon & Lime Soda — fresh green lettering, "Artificial Color," a citrus flavor most small bottlers offered.
• 🍦 Cream Soda — red and pink lettering, made with vanilla and cane sugar, signed Budd's Beverages, Inc.
• 🍊 Orange Soda — the flavor that carries the dual "Newport, N.H., Lebanon, N.H." address, tying two Upper Valley towns to one bottle.

📜 Why a Complete Set Is a Different Thing Than Eight Singles

Loose Budd labels do turn up one and two at a time — a single root beer here, a stray grape there. What is genuinely uncommon is the whole run assembled: every flavor the company made, side by side, as a complete flavor line. A set like this tells a story a single label cannot. It shows you the bottler's entire ambition in one glance — the range it hoped to sell, the way it varied its color and kept its logo constant, the difference between the flavors it corporatized under "Budd's Beverages, Inc." and the ones it signed with the older "Newport Bottling Works." Assembled sets like this rarely come to market, and this is offered as the only complete Budd set currently listed. For a collector of soda advertising, a New Hampshire local historian, or anyone building a framed grouping, one-of-each is the version worth having.

✨ Genuine, Unused, New Old Stock

Each of the eight is an original period label in New Old Stock condition — printed decades ago, held as unused shop stock, and never applied to a bottle. Turn one over and the back is clean, blank cream paper with no glue and no printing, which is exactly what unused old stock looks like and the surest proof that these are the real thing rather than modern reprints. The color is strong and even, the bronze ink still catches the light, and the sheets present as bright Mint / Near-Mint-plus survivors with only the faint honest handling you would expect of paper this age. Each label measures approximately 4¼ by 3¾ inches — true bottle-size — and all eight are offered exactly as photographed, with nothing retouched, trimmed or hidden.

🍾 The Five-Cent Soda World These Came From

To understand why a set of eight little labels matters, it helps to picture the world they were made for. In the 1920s, soda was overwhelmingly a local business. Before national distribution and refrigerated trucking, nearly every town of any size had its own bottling works — a small plant that mixed flavored syrup with carbonated water, filled thick returnable glass bottles, crowned them with a crimped metal cap, and pasted on a paper label like these before sending them out to the corner store and the lunch counter.

A bottle of Budd cost a nickel, came back empty to be washed and refilled, and its label was a disposable thing, meant to be soaked off and thrown away. That is exactly what makes surviving labels uncommon and unused ones rarer still: the whole point of the object was that it would not last. The Newport Bottling Works competed in that world flavor by flavor — a ginger ale to rival the big brands, a kola to stand in for the national colas, a root beer and a cream soda and a grape and an orange for the children and the soda fountain.

Each label in this set is a small billboard for one of those bottles, and together they are the complete advertising face the company showed its town across the counter.

🔍 How to Know These Are the Real Thing

Three things mark these as genuine period New Old Stock rather than modern reproductions, and all three are visible in the photographs. First, the backs: clean, blank cream paper with no adhesive and no printing — a reproduction is typically printed on bright modern white stock, and a used label carries glue ghosting and bottle staining. Second, the printing itself: the "Budd" script and the coupe-glass logo are laid down in genuine period inks, including the real metallic bronze that catches the light on the glass — not a flat yellow simulation of gold. Third, the small honest imperfections of age and hand-press work: the faint toning of the cream stock, the slight registration character of multi-color printing, the gentle handling wear at the edges. There is no lithographer's imprint anywhere in the margins of any of the eight, and none is claimed. Taken together, these are the fingerprints of authentic 1920s bottling-works stock.

🖼️ Living With the Set

• 🖼️ Float all eight in one long multi-opening frame for an instant wall of period soda color — a kitchen, a bar cart corner, a game room.
• 🏡 Group them by flavor family, or arrange them to lead with the gleaming Creamy Root Beer and the navy Ginger Ale.
• 📚 Pair the set with New Hampshire or Upper Valley local history; Newport and Lebanon collectors know exactly what this is.
• 🎁 Give the complete run to a soda-pop collector, a bottle-digger, or anyone who loves early-century American advertising art.
• 🥤 Keep it intact — a full flavor line is far harder to reassemble later than it is to preserve now.

A small New Hampshire bottling works spoke to its town through eight little labels. Here they all are, together, unused, and as bright as the day they left the press.