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Leif Sonne likes beer bottles. The engineer from a small town called Svendborg in Denmark has been collecting unopened bottles of beer since 1968. Over the past 46 years he has amassed a collection of over 22,000. This achievement earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Leif can now boast the largest unopened beer bottle collection in the world.

This record should not be confused with the record achieved by Ron Werner from the USA. Many more people have heard about Ron as he owns the largest beer bottle collection, (many of which are empty).

This makes all the difference. Although some of the beer will be completely undrinkable now, each of leif’s bottles contains the original liquid that left the brewery. And in our mind that is a far better type of collection.

It all began with Leif collecting the easy to obtain, local European varieties of beer bottle. This of course expanded to include beers from all over the world.

By the 1990s the collection had grown too large to be accommodated within his home.

During this time, Leif started to obtain a name for himself due to his collection. Danish mega brewery Carlsberg approached him with an offer to house his beer within their museum in Copenhagen.

(A fitting turn of events as many of Sonne’s early beer bottle acquisitions came from Carlsberg). In 1993 the collection was housed there, where it continued to expand under Leif’s guidance.

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By 2007, the collection had grown to more than 22,000 different bottles, and was certified by Guinness World Records to be the largest collection of bottled beer in the world.