Me For Yoo Hoo?

Whoa, guys. I know, I have been terrible about updating. Apologies!  But Michael and I were just at a baseball card convention over the weekend and we saw something that I couldn't NOT talk about. Check this out.

They're Yoo-hoo caps.  We saw a mint condition Mickey Mantle bottle cap (see bottom row, middle for a NON-mint condition bottle cap) at the show, in a little display box.

Now, I'm all for collecting, and baseball memorabilia is nothing to sneeze at. Michael is an avid collector of autographs and I wholeheartedly encourage his collecting (as he does for me!)

But, when we asked the guy who was displaying his Mickey Mantle Yoo-hoo bottle cap how much it was going for, he said, without blinking an eye: $1,000.

Michael and I looked at each other with disbelief. Did this guy actually think he was going to sell this bottle cap for $1,000? That is a LOT of money. For a bottle cap. Granted, Mantle seems to have a demand where prices for his memorabilia hasn't gone down, but still.  And it begs the question of my readers: how much are you willing to spend on a bottle cap? Is $1,000 a reasonable price? Is it outrageous? Is it more about the baseball aspect? Or are there bottle caps out there that are like, the holy grail of bottle caps and no price is too large to have it?

Honestly, Michael and I put a limit on how much we'll spend on our respective hobbies. We are collectors, but we also have a budget to keep.

Bottle cap blues

I know it has been forever since I've posted. I'm still around, still collecting, just been busy.  But thought you would enjoy this video.

I'll write more soon.

arnold palmer

ESPN "This Is Sports Center" commercials are hilarious. Michael and I have spent hours upon hours watching and deconstructing them.

So, what better excuse do I have than Arnold Palmer's Half and Half (Light!) bottle cap, to show a great Sports Center commercial here:

This is brilliant, as is the bottle cap. If only the actual drink tasted as good as a real Arnold Palmer: half iced tea, half lemonade. They sort of ruin it by putting the booze in, if that is possible (I honestly can't believe I'm saying that!).

If only Shaq would make a bottled drink with a cool bottle cap. Then I could show this commercial:

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?!

great divide brewing co.

Michael and I have been having a great time exploring our new neighborhood. Everything feels new, even though we aren't that far away from our old place. New commute, new neighbors, new restaurants that are *just* around the corner, and best of all, new grocery stores.

Sure, I had seen Euro Market from our elevated train for years, but I just assumed it was a poor-man's Titan, and never bothered to go in. I was a silly girl then. I am wiser now. And looking for bottle caps.

Euro Market has an entire back wall devoted to beers from around the country/world. It wasn't quite New Beer Distributor, but it came pretty darn close. Everything was available by the bottle, and damn they had selection. Michael and I were like kids in a (foreign) candy store.

We came away with a few good finds, but the first beer we actually cracked open was Great Divide Brewing Co.'s Samurai. An unfiltered beer, it was a nice conclusion to a rainy night. And the bottle cap? Check this out:

Great Minds Drink Alike! An excellent saying. Words to live by. Thank you, Great Divide for putting those words in my mouth (and some tasty beer).

zywiec

Well, crown fans, I think it's time for a mailbag of sorts. Remember last year when @Vadrach sent me a whole slew of bottle caps? It is time I paid that glorious shipment some more due.

Zywiec, hailing from Poland, is a brewery that has been around since the 1800s. 1856, to be exact. To make things easy on us, Zywiec Brewery is in in Zywiec, Poland. Nice.

Their bottle cap is pretty neat. We have a crown, the year the brewery was founded, the name of the brewery, and best of all, a man and a woman in some sort of traditional garb dancing a traditional dance. They are complete with feathers in their hats, socks/stockings pulled up to their knees, and look really happy to be there. If I were depicted on a bottle cap, I'd probably be doing the same dance!

There is a lot going on, though: I sort of want the Zywiec logo to be a little smaller so that the dancers could get some more surface area. But that's a small quibble. The fact that there are two dancers on there is certainly better than one dancer. And who doesn't love a crown on a crown?!

If only I knew what the beer tasted like... I'll have to check out my international grocery store to see if they carry it. You never know in NYC!

duff

Happy One Year Anniversary, SCBC readers!  It was a year ago on Feb 19 that I started this blog. Wow! So much has happened since then, and I've tasted so many sodas, beers, maltas (yuck), and other bizarre beverages, all with bottle caps of varying degrees of coolness. It was a great year, and I'm looking forward to another one.

What better way to celebrate one year than with a bottle cap that covers a lot of territory. The last time I mentioned Duff beer, I was talking about Horny Goat, Milwaukee, and fake TV beers. But NOW, I can talk about Duff beer as an actual beer. Which, amazingly, it is. I can't get it here in the U.S., but thanks to this funny thing called Ebay, I was able to get a Duff bottle cap quite cheaply. (Thanks Internet!)

This bottle cap sort of has it all. It's a fictional beer that is now real. It uses the real Simpsons font. It is related, in some way, to a TV show that is awesome (well, used to be more awesome than it is, but DID just celebrate its 500th episode, so they must still be doing something right.) I'm still waiting for the DVD of just Itchy and Scratchy cartoons to come out, which I can't believe hasn't been done yet. That's gold, people. GOLD. Duff Beer has already been made. We need something else, now.

And how do they keep thinking up couch gags?  I wonder if there is just one person whose job it is to think up new ones. I would very much like that job. Just saying.