Tips for De-labeling Glass Bottles

My cousin asked me decorate his wedding on a budget of $500. At the time I thought it was a lot of money, but after researching ideas and pricing I quickly realized how little $500 gets you for a wedding. One of my ideas was to use recylcled beer and wine bottles- the reasoning being that they have small openings and would require very little flowers for each bottle and because I could recycle some of the ones I already have. So I started to get to work and I soon discovered how labor intensive this actual is. 

Here are the lessons I learned from delabeling bottles:

1. SOAK SOAK SOAK! And not just for 30 minutes... at least a day or more. You can add soap to your water or whatever trick you have up your sleeve, but just make sure it sits in water for a while.

2. Some bottles will be easy to delabel than others. The easiest bottle for me to delabel is Stella Artois followed by New Belgium. My boyfriend said Guinness is actually very easy as well but we don't really drink that at home. I found Stone and Green Flash particularly difficult to remove. 

3. What to do with the left over glue on the bottles? Get a rag put some oil on it and a little baking powder on the bottle and scrub away. Rinse the bottles after with dishwashing soap, like Palmolive, to remove any leftover oil residue. 

I was able to delabel about 24 beer bottles and 3 wine bottles. I need about 100 beer bottles and 20 wine bottles. I decided that I may possibly buy the rest of the beer bottles from a home brew store. I can get a case (24 bottles) for about $13.95. I will still use the ones I de-labeled because I think they have a little more character than the ones sold at the home brew store.