Vintage Budd Beverages Soda Bottle Labels, Complete Set of 8, Newport New Hampshire 🥤

Size: 4 1/4 x 3 3/4 inches ~ unused, never applied to a bottle.

🥤 Eight Flavors From One Newport Bottling Works, Never Poured

This is a complete, matched set of all eight soda labels Budd Beverages ever put on a bottle in Newport, New Hampshire — Golden Ginger Ale, Beverages, Creamy Root Beer, Imitation Grape Soda, Kola, Lemon & Lime Soda, Cream Soda and Orange Soda, one of each, gathered back into the full flavor line instead of sold off as loose singles. Every one is original, unused old stock: printed, never applied to a bottle, and still bright.

🏭 Alexander Budnitz and the Newport Bottling Works

The name on every label is short for the man who started the company. Alexander Budnitz founded Budd's in Newport in 1916, and it began life as a grocery aimed at the town's Polish immigrant community — "Budd" is simply Budnitz, trimmed down for the sign. In 1922 the company started bottling its own carbonated sodas at what it called the Newport Bottling Works, and by the 1930s Budd's flavors were known across New Hampshire and into part of Vermont. Alongside its own line, the company distributed Moxie, Coca-Cola, and Ted's Root Beer — a Moxie Company brand named for Red Sox slugger Ted Williams and sold for about a decade, roughly 1957 to 1967. Budd's own house brands included Dartmouth Dry, Fruit Bowl and Old Sol. The business closed its doors in 1972.

Budd bottles have outlasted the company. The New Hampshire Historical Society holds a "BUDDS BEST" crown-top bottle marked "NEWPORT BOTTLING WORKS, NEWPORT, N.H." — broadly dated to the first half of the 1900s in their own catalog — and, separately, a 1962 Budd's bottle that still reads "SINCE 1916" on the glass, forty-six years after the company started.

🎨 The Label Itself — a Bronze Coupe Glass and a Slogan

All eight labels share one design. "Budd" sweeps across the top in a big red script, the last letter curling back under the word. Below it sits a wide, shallow coupe glass — the shape of a champagne saucer — printed in a warm metallic bronze, with a scatter of rising bubbles and the slogan "THE TASTE TELLS" banded straight across the bowl. "QUALITY SINCE" and "BEVERAGES 1916" flank the stem of the glass, and a contents line at the bottom reads "1 PT. 10 FL. OZS." — a 26-ounce bottle, the same size Coca-Cola introduced as its own Family Size in 1955. That doesn't date Budd's label to 1955; it just places these in the same mid-century world of soda sizing. A gold metallic border runs around the whole design, and each flavor gets its own lettering color under the glass.

🌈 All Eight, Read Straight Off the Labels

• Golden Ginger Ale carries blue lettering and the fullest ingredient line of the set: "Made from carbonated filtered water, flavor, citric acid, cane sugar and caramel color." It's signed Newport Bottling Works, Newport, N.H. — the signature five of the eight labels share.
• Beverages is the odd one out: navy lettering, but no flavor name printed beyond the generic word itself. "Flavor designated on crown" sits right there on the label — the actual flavor went on the bottle cap, not the paper, so one printing could ride out on more than one soda. This one is signed Budd's Beverages, Inc. instead of the bottling-works name.
• Creamy Root Beer skips the ingredient panel entirely — just the maroon-brown flavor name and that same Newport Bottling Works signature.
• Imitation Grape Soda keeps its silver-gray lettering honest: "Artificial flavor and color," printed plainly rather than hidden, under that same bottling-works name.
• Kola, in red, spells out exactly what's in the bottle: "Contains carbonated water, sugar, kola flavor, acid and caramel color."
• Lemon & Lime Soda, in green, says only "Artificial color" and rounds out the run of five carrying the bottling-works signature.
• Cream Soda, in red and pink, lists vanilla extract, cane sugar and caramel color among its ingredients, and like the house label, carries the corporate Budd's Beverages, Inc. name.
• Orange Soda closes the set with cane sugar, flavor, citric acid and artificial color — and it's the only label naming a second town, adding Lebanon, N.H. beside Newport.

Turn any of them over and the back is plain, unglued paper — a faint offset ghost of the coupe glass shows through on some of them, just the mark of one sheet resting against another in a stack. None of the eight ever met a bottle.

📍 Newport and Lebanon, New Hampshire

Newport was chartered in 1761 and named for Henry Newport, and it's been the seat of Sullivan County since 1827. The Sugar River gave the town its water power, and Newport built a real little mill economy on it — the Dexter Richards & Sons woolen mill went up in 1905, and Sibley Scythe Co. turned out scythes there from 1842 to 1929. The Sugar River Railroad reached town in 1871. By 1930, with Budd's soda business already running, Newport's population was 4,659. It's also the birthplace of Sarah Josepha Hale, born there in 1788, who wrote "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in 1830 and spent decades campaigning for a national Thanksgiving — a campaign that got Abraham Lincoln to proclaim one in 1863. A small town with an outsized couple of footnotes in American life, and Budd's was part of its everyday commerce for more than fifty years.

The Orange Soda label's second address, Lebanon, N.H., sits on the Connecticut River in Grafton County, right next door to Hanover and Dartmouth College — so you can guess where the house brand "Dartmouth Dry" got its name. Lebanon also happens to be the town these labels ship from, so this set is very nearly going out from home.

🕰️ Why I Call These Vintage, Not Antique

Labels like these get called 1920s stock more often than not, mostly because "QUALITY SINCE 1916" reads like a print date if you don't look past it. It isn't one — it's the founding year, and Budd kept it on its labels for decades; that 1962 bottle at the Historical Society still says "SINCE 1916" long after the company was well established. What actually dates these labels is the ingredient wording: "artificial flavor and color" and "artificial color," spelled out plainly on four of the eight, is exactly the kind of disclosure the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act required once it took effect. Budd closed in 1972. So these were printed somewhere in that window, roughly 1940 to 1972 — comfortably Vintage, and not the 1920s they're sometimes sold as.

📦 A Stack of Sets, All Alike

I have a stack of these complete sets, and this listing is one whole run — one matched set of all eight flavors. Every set is unused old stock, never applied to a bottle, with strong color and the bronze ink still catching light. The one photographed is a fair, honest example, not the pick of the stack; most of what's left is as nice or a touch nicer, with the odd bit of edge curl here and there, same as you'd expect from paper this old that's simply been resting in a stack.

A small New Hampshire bottler once spoke to its whole town through eight little labels. Here they all are together — unused, unfaded, and finally back in one place.