assorted soda

You may recall last fall my sqee'ing over the Barn Sale and my fantastic haul from that trip upstate. It's taken me a while to actually get to these, and I needed to figure out a good way to write about them. There are too many to do one post per crown, so I needed a theme.

In my opinion, the best of the lot can be found in this post. We have assorted regional and national sodas from back when there was more than just Coke and Pepsi. All of these crowns are cork-lined, and I just love the variety. These crowns really show (in some cases) the kind of beverage you're about to drink.  Don't just rely on the label. Check out our crowns, too, they seem to say.

There are three basic categories. The first is miscellaneous: we have a Blue Bird Grape Soda (why can't it be Purple Bird?) with a lovely blue bird in a top hat on a branch. Fun! They were putting birds on things before Portlandia even thought of it. And then there's Dodge City Sarsaparilla. When Michael and I went to Kansas City, we kept talking about going to Dodge, and then getting the hell out. But who even needs to go there when you have the bottle cap with a cowboy hat on it?

Next category: flavors. Bitter Lemon Dandy Soda--I like that it's DANDY; Cranberry Cola, which actually looks like it might have cherries on the crown; and Lemon Blossom Soda, which looks like something out of Brooklyn or Portlandia with those dainty little flowers.

But best of all, we have the crowns with people on them. There's a dandy with a top hat and a bowtie on Dandy Cola; a guy giving some sort of pointy finger and who clearly has some Old Fashioned Moxie; and to top it off, a creepy clown named Corky. What on earth was THAT soda?!

various sodas

As I mentioned before, I had a pretty amazing time this year at the barn sale in "upstate" NY. Tons of soda caps for $.25 or $.50 a pop, and I tried to snatch as many of the cool ones as I could.

Two particularly fun ones that I found are these Raspberry and Cherry Soda caps.

Part of the reason I like them is because they aren't trying to hide the fact that they're imitation and artificial sodas. With today's foodies focused so much on artisan, local, and all natural, I find it amusing to see the blatant indication of fake food colors/flavors/etc on bottle caps. It was a simpler time back then, wasn't it?

I also love the blatant use of a Native American on the Pequot bottle cap -- and it really does beg the question: what on earth does a Native American have to do with an imitation black raspberry soda?

The Wild Cherry Soda? Well, I just like the font -- what is up with that Y? It doesn't even look like a letter! Or a Cherry! But it does make the artificial-ness of the soda seem just a little fancier.

ted's root beer

It was certainly a stellar week in bottle caps for me. Not only did I get a great shipment of bottle caps from Greg, I also got a few from Michael's mother (in a package of things containing, among other things, a full season's supply of sweet potatoes). My mom also took me on a beer/soda run. More about that later this week.

But the best thing was this weekend when Michael and I went up to my parents' house for our annual trip upstate to visit our favorite apple orchard and purchase fruit, pies, freshly made donuts, hot cider, all natural peanut butter and other delicious things for the fall. We peep leaves, listen to 80's rock on the radio, and just get out of the city for a few hours. It's a nice annual tradition that I've been doing since I was a kid, and I'm glad that Michael is game for continuing the tradition every year.

Down the street from Salinger's Orchard, there's a Barn Sale. Some woman sells pumpkins, old milk bottles, light-switch covers, and junk from her basement, along with some tin signs that may or may not be vintage (I think not, but I could be wrong). Usually, the Barn Sale is good for a laugh, but generally a bust in terms of actually finding fun stuff to buy.

Last year that changed when we found an awesome replica tin sign for Michael's dad -- which we were able to get signed by Stan the Man Musial. The streak continued this year when I found...yes...4 bins full of cork-lined soda caps. You could probably hear my squealing with delight all the way up the hill at Salinger's. They didn't know what was going on!

I'll be sure to make a note in the labels below when I'm blogging about a Barn Sale bottle cap, but the one that I'm most excited about, which also ties in well with last week's Suds Series, is Ted's Root Beer, a line of beer made by Moxie in the '60s.

I had been coveting this bottle cap via eBay for some time now, and kept threatening to spend up to $10-$15 for the bottle cap. But I knew that this was just way too much for a crown, so I held off. Thank goodness I did.

This bottle cap is pretty amazing. It has a lot going for it: endorsed by a celebrity, it has "stitching" like a baseball, it's a root beer bottle cap, and it's cork-lined. Who knows if it is authentic, but it wasn't expensive, and damn, it makes me happy.

This might be a contender for the HOF! Even without an animal on it!