Old bottles are a good source of font examples, compiling a large enough database is likely to give some regionally significant statistics and maybe lead to the identification of some of them.
Beer bottles are collected by type and by brand name, bet you can hope for is to date to within a few years. Lots of bottle works are off the map as no-one has written about them - although they might be listed in trade sources. I can't even identify bottles made at Moncrieff's separate bottle factory and they were producing bottles for a hundred years or so...