Metal & Rock: Bottles & Cans
- Randall Wilburn
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 22 hours ago
Inside the Swedish archive of Pontus — a collector whose metal collection o f has spent more than a decade tracking the beers, wines, and spirits that metal bands put their name on, and the fan-made bootlegs that orbit around them.
By the Fermented Metal staff | Interview conducted by editor Randall Wilburn
Pontus does not, by his own admission, drink much. He keeps a few beers in the fridge, likes a light lager, and will happily tell you the Motörhead pilsners are still the ones he reaches for. And yet, tucked into a corner of Sweden, he has built one of the more unusual reference libraries in heavy music — a shelf-after-shelf collection of the bottles, cans, and branded drinks that bands have put their logos on over the last forty years.
The beverages, though, are just one wing of a much larger house. Pontus catalogues his full archive at metalcollection.se, a dense, lovingly maintained personal site that sprawls across vinyl and LPs grouped alphabetically from A to Z, CDs, CD singles, and 7-inches, deep band-specific pages for the acts he has followed longest — Megadeth, D-A-D, Jorn Lande, and many more — a genre index with its own stops for black metal and beyond, a setlists section thick with torn paper from shows across Sweden and abroad, a “Mixed stuff” drawer for everything that refuses to be categorized, and a photo archive that documents the decades he has spent turning up at gigs. Under all of that, filed as its own section, sits “Music Beverages & more” — the corner of the collection that first caught our eye.
What began around 2012 as a pair of KISS wine bottles bought from a friend “because they looked cool” has become, whether Pontus intended it or not, a quiet act of preservation. Swedish spirits shops release band-branded runs. German webstores won’t ship to Stockholm. A Guns N’ Roses reference hides on a dusty American liquor-store shelf until someone is willing to drive between cities to find it. Every bottle is a small logistics problem and, eventually, an artifact.
We reached out to Pontus to talk about how the collection started, what he still hunts for, where he finds fan-made oddities, and what this strange little niche of memorabilia says about the way metal fans hold onto the bands they love. He answered from Sweden, between spins of VAIN, Megadeth, and a new Gothenburg band he thinks sounds like a young Metallica.
“Back then there wasn’t very much to collect and items were sometimes difficult to find.”
— Pontus, on the early years of the archive
HOW IT STARTED
Pontus places the start of the collection at roughly 2012. “Back then there wasn’t very much to collect and items were sometimes difficult to find,” he says. The trigger was a pair of KISS wine bottles bought off a friend — purely an aesthetic decision. From there, the interest “slowly started to grow.”
Today he describes himself as a semi-retired collector. “I hardly collect anymore but I buy some things now and then.” Sweden, he notes, is an unexpectedly fertile market: a handful of Swedish companies put out band-branded beer, wine, and spirits on a regular cadence. The hurdle is everything else. Rammstein’s web shop, for example, won’t ship to Sweden at all — so Pontus routes purchases through a German contact who buys the bottles and then mails them privately across the border. The collection, in other words, is also a network of favours.
Why Collaborate?
THE FAN-MADE UNDERGROUND
Not every bottle on Pontus’ shelves came from a label deal or a band webstore. A whole subcategory of his archive is fan-made — unofficial homebrews and custom-label pressings that circulate through the community. An Ozzy “Blizzard of Ozz” beer, for instance, was never an official release; a fan designed the label, bottled the beer, and put it into the wild.
“I have found some fan-made stuff on eBay and also in Facebook groups,” he says. “Some are very nicely made and some pretty bad.” It’s the kind of ecosystem collectors of any niche will recognize — an unofficial layer running alongside the licensed one, traded peer-to-peer, with quality that swings wildly between something that could pass for a real brewery release and something printed on a home printer.
THE HUNT, AND WHAT HURTS TO HOLD
Ask him which single bottle was hardest to find and the answer is immediate: Night Train. The $4 fortified wine Guns N’ Roses wrote a song about is famously cheap and, it turns out, famously regional. “A guy in the US went to a lot of stores before he finally found it,” Pontus says. Once the bottle was located, the real cost showed up in the shipping: postage from the US to Sweden, plus Swedish customs, made a bottle of inexpensive fortified wine into a logistical project.
“My rarest bottle today is a Motörhead beer signed by Lemmy, Phil, and Mikkey. Now it’s only Mikkey still alive of those three.”
— Pontus
That last line is the heart of the collection, and the reason a project like this stops being a hobby and starts being an archive. The bottle is a single object that passed through the hands of three specific men in a specific configuration — a configuration that will never exist again. Lemmy Kilmister and Philthy Animal Taylor are both gone; Mikkey Dee is still touring. The signatures are a timestamp. The bottle is what’s left.
WHAT’S STILL MISSING
For a collector to stop chasing something is almost a philosophical move, and Pontus has quietly made it. “Nothing today,” he says of active want-list items. The Megadeth wines used to be the whale — he wanted the full set — but the sheer volume of Mustaine Vineyards releases wore him out.
One bottle still flickers on the horizon: a W.A.S.P. wine released in the late ’80s. “It would be nice to have,” he says, “but it costs way too much if you even find it.” File it under the collector’s version of a white whale: known to exist, almost never for sale, priced beyond reason when it does surface.
WHAT DOES PONTUS DRINK?
Despite the shelves, Pontus is a light drinker. “I don’t drink much but I like to have a few beers,” he says. The daily driver, when he pours one, is a Motörhead — “really good, if you like a light lager.” It’s a useful reminder that a collection built around alcohol is not necessarily a collection about drinking. For Pontus, the bottles are primarily objects: labels, eras, signatures, shipping receipts, stories about the guy in the US who drove between stores.
WHERE TO DRINK METAL IN SWEDEN
There aren’t many breweries in Sweden running dedicated metal programs, but the bar side of the scene is well-served. In Gothenburg, Pontus points to 2112 — the restaurant owned by former In Flames members, whose name will need no translation for Rush fans. In Stockholm, there’s Garlic & Shots, co-owned by Swedish musicians including members of Candlemass, serving garlic-intensive food and shot menus underneath a heavy-music aesthetic.
Iron Maiden and Robinsons Brewery
IN THE EARS
Asked what he’s listening to, Pontus gives the kind of sprawling, list-heavy answer that outs a lifelong fan. He buys a lot of music. He still returns to the ’80s bands that shaped him — VAIN, Megadeth, HammerFall, KISS, In Flames, D-A-D, and Accept all make his all-time list — but his recent-listens log has teeth too.
Top of the recommendation list: Bloodstain, a new Swedish band he describes as sounding “like a young Metallica,” and The Halo Effect, the supergroup built from former In Flames members fronted by Mikael Stanne of Dark Tranquillity. Beyond those, he rattles off a tour of the melodic and hard rock end of the Swedish scene: Eclipse, Dynazty, Crashdiet, Sister Sin, H.E.A.T., Crazy Lixx — a useful starter-pack for any reader of this magazine with a Spotify queue to feed.
“I like to go back to the bands from the ’80s era, but there are many newer bands I also like.”
— Pontus
WHY IT MATTERS
Pontus is unassuming about what he’s built. He might flinch at being called a "curator". But every shelf full of retired tour beer, every signed Motörhead ale that outlives two of the three signatories, every fan-made Blizzard of Ozz bootleg that slipped through a Facebook group — all of it is a record of how this music got woven into daily life. Metal fandom, as this archive quietly argues, is not just what you listen to. It’s what’s sitting unopened on the shelf, waiting for a reason.
The full collection — beers, wines, spirits, fan-made oddities, and more — is catalogued on Pontus’ Metal Collection site, under the Music Beverages & more section. Maybe somebody who reads this, might just look him up and send him something new?
To see everything in Pontus's collection click on the image below
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