Haven't done anything with food coloring, but green and red should give you a brown...

I stage managed a show recently and used a spiced apple cider mix, darkened with a tiny splash of cola, for whiskey. The actors loved it, but it doesn't take care of the "sticky spill" problem if there's an accident.  Herb teas have also been popular. If anyone uses a tea or a cider mix, make sure you make it ahead of time and let it chill in the fridge to take out the cloudiness.

Along these same lines -- if anybody ever needs a wine bottle that has to be opened on stage, as in "Lend Me a Tenor," shops and online stores that sell supplies for making homemade wine also sell corks and corkers, so you can use water and food coloring in the bottles. Mike makes a mean homemade wine so has all the supplies already, which came in handy recently when I directed "Breaking Legs" and wanted racks of "wine" displayed on the set.  Didn't want to use the real stuff under those hot lights (not if we wanted to drink it later!), and empty bottles on our small stage look obviously empty, so we filled and corked 30 or 40 bottles with colored and plain water. They looked great!

Many shows I've either directed or acted in required opening a bottle of champagne in view of the audience.  A trick we used quite successfully was re-filling a empty champagne bottle with ginger ale and then, just before corking it, dropping in a half-tablet of Alka-Seltzer into it.  Wrapping the cork in heavy stationery foil adds to the illusion of a "new" bottle. 

When the bottle is opened, the extra carbonation provided by the Alka-Seltzer creates just the right "pop" and often is accompanied by the rush of liquid.  The bottle needs to be tricked this way before every performance as the carbonation tends not to last overnight. 

Needless to say, this is MUCH cheaper than using a fresh bottle every night.  For pink champagne, substitute Cherry 7-Up for the ginger ale.

Screw top beer bottles?

All ours here are crown caps or rip top!

Chookas

What? Crown caps or rip top? More please!

Crown caps are the old fashioned bottle caps that you use a bottle opener on. Rip top, I assume, is a can with a pull tab, though the Gaafa may have to correct me on that.

You can buy plain brown beer bottles, crown caps and a capper from a local home brew shop or one online. Then fill the bottles with ginger ale or whatever and experiment. You can print out your own labels on any computer. As for the screw caps that are used on most US beer bottles today, some brew shops carry them, but I've never used them and have no idea how easy (or difficult) they'd be to put on.

Rip tops are applied similar to crown tops, except you pull a tab on the edge & rip it off, instead of using a bottle opener. Mikes is correct that it is the same principle as a can of drink [known as a ?tinny? or ?tube?]. The ?home-brew? shops sell various cap applicators - not that I know much about brewing beer at home, as I don?t like the stuff! The bod next door, has quite a large brewing plant in his back shed, with all the paraphernalia, for producing beer & spirits, under his own personlised labels.

We only have one local beer here with a screw top as such, that?s the ?Darwin Stubby?, which comes in 4 litre bottles. However some of the imported beers have screw tops, all the rest are the normal small ?stubby?s? are crown twist tops, which come in ?slabs? of 12 or more. There are some local boutique beers, like ?Red Ant? & ?Dog Bolter?, that have a crown twist cap. But they are not that popular, as it?s takes practice to twist them off, without possibly cutting yourself at the first attempt!

What we do for props here, is use a ?Ginger beer? which comes in a Stubby or Tinny, that looks like the normal ?Swan? or ?Emu? beers available from the pub & stick our own labels on, as suggested by Mike.

I have never fallen for the idea, suggested by some actors, to substitute the low alcohol beers available. It?s still alcohol, no matter what they say & you can still suffer the same problems, when you mix it with the heat of stage lighting.

Chookas

A big "amen" on the low alcohol beer. The "no booze rule" before or during rehearsals or performances is something we take very seriously around here. After is a whole 'nother set of stories, of course.

Gaafa, I'm not fond of beer either, but wine is a whole 'nother story. I've been making my own now for several years and have been very pleased with the results. I've also made my own soda (pop, whatever) using beer bottles. That's good stuff.