After 16 months in the game, I feel safe calling myself an expert in glass baby bottles. I knew right from the start that I wanted to go glass with Will's bottles to avoid unsavory leaching into his earliest meals. There are a few more glass bottles on the market now than when we started this journey (ones I'll have to try out next time around!) but here's my rundown on the three that we tried.
First up are Lifefactory bottles, which come with silicone sleeves in fun colors. At $14.99 for the smaller bottles, they're definitely in the "spendy" camp but I knew they'd be sturdy from dropping my adult-sized Lifefactory water bottle on concrete more than once.
I like the way they look (we've received many compliments on them) but I really like how they've stood up to tons of use. First they withstood sleepy, clumsy new parents who were perpetually knocking things over and they are still in use with a toddler who likes throwing everything. Speaking of "still in use", you can see in the photo below that Lifefactory sells tops to turn their bottles into sippy cups once the traditional bottle days are over. These still get heavy daily use and will still be in good shape when we have another baby down the road.
So although these next bottles don't turn into sippy cups like the Lifefactory ones, these were actually my favorite during the bottle stage of Will's life. The Phillips AVENT glass bottles have a wide neck which made them super easy to clean and super easy to pour pumped milk into without splashing/wasting any. These two reasons alone are enough to earn a new mom's love, but I should mention that they were also super sturdy, even without a sleeve (though I see that you can buy those online). Will has tossed these onto the sidewalk from his stroller before and though I gasped and expected breakage while it happened, they were fine. They were also wider than the other bottles and easy for Will's little hands to grip once he began feeding himself. Once you figure out how to get the top on (it needs to be done just so), these are a solid glass bottle choice and one I'd definitely recommend.
The third type of glass bottles we used were Dr. Brown's. I know other people love these (4.5 stars on Amazon), but I didn't like them at all. All of the hardware that comes with the bottles (see below) is supposed to help with gas and spit-up. We didn't notice any remarkable difference (though to be fair, Will wasn't very fussy to begin with) and I hated cleaning all of the parts. My biggest problem with them, however, was that the neck of two out of four bottles chipped. Pretty much the biggest problem you can have with a glass baby bottle. I know that Will didn't get any glass, but I was mad that I had to throw away two full bottles of pumped milk and 50% faulty bottles were enough to have them taken out of our rotation (I carefully used the remaining non-chipped ones for milk storage).
Any experience with glass bottles? Anything I missed? This is what worked (& didn't work) for us over the last year but I'd love to hear other suggestions!