Antique Hires Root Beer Cork Bottle Cap 🥤 American Original, Brand Discontinued 2022 (1930s)

Whatever Happened to Hires Root Beer? 🥤 Antique 1930s Hires Cork Bottle Cap

Size: 1 1/4"

Hires is gone. The root beer a Philadelphia pharmacist started selling in 1876 — for the better part of a century and a half one of the best-known names in American soda — is no longer among Keurig Dr Pepper's brands. The last cans came off a line in Ottumwa, Iowa, and in August 2024 the last company still making Hires fountain syrup sold out. Collectors put it in four words: American icon, RIP 2022.

This cap comes from the years when Hires was confident enough to practically give it away: 6 for 1¢ — with 6 at regular price.

🟠 What This Is

An unused Hires Root Beer crown cap, new old stock, never crimped onto a bottle. Hires orange, with "Hires" arched across the top in chunky cream letters outlined in black, a big 6 and 1¢ either side of the word FOR, and a smaller 6 set into the line WITH 6 AT REGULAR PRICE around the bottom.

Turn it over and the original natural cork liner is still pressed inside the fluted skirt — the seal every crown cap relied on before plastic liners took over.

📅 How Old It Is

1930s. The offer is printed on the cap itself — buy six at the regular price, get six more for a penny — the kind of multi-bottle, penny-deal pricing that Depression-era soda marketing leaned on, from a time when the cap under the opener was the cheapest billboard a bottler owned. The cork liner fits the same years.

🥤 The Pharmacist From Roadstown

Charles Elmer Hires was born on 19 August 1851 in Roadstown, in Hopewell Township, New Jersey. At twelve his parents sent him to work as an apprentice in a drugstore, and he grew up to be a pharmacist in Philadelphia — a trade that, in those years, meant mixing tonics, extracts and flavorings behind the counter.

🍺 Root Tea, Root Beer, And The Coal Miners

How Hires found root beer is a legend with more than one version. The official story says he first tasted a root-and-herb brew on his honeymoon in 1875 and went home to make his own; historians point out that the time and place may never really be known.

The better story is about the name. As it is told in Pennsylvania, Russell Conwell — the preacher who founded Temple University — urged Hires to sell his drink to the hard-drinking Pennsylvania coal miners as an alternative to the saloon. Miners would never order something called "root tea." They might order a root beer. Hires changed the name before the Centennial, and the word stuck to a whole category of American drink.

🎪 1876: The Centennial Exposition

At Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition — the great world's fair where Alexander Graham Bell showed off the telephone — Hires was selling 25-cent packets of powder, each enough to make a gallon of root beer at home, and handing out free glasses to win customers. It worked.

📈 From Powder To Fountain To Bottle

• 1884 — a liquid extract, and a syrup for soda fountains
• 1890 — The Charles E. Hires Company is incorporated and starts selling root beer in small bottles
• 1891 — more than a million bottles sold, by the company's own count

Hires sold it as "The Temperance Drink" and "the Greatest Health-Giving Beverage in the World," with the jingle-before-jingles slogan "Join Health and Cheer; Drink Hires Rootbeer." The story goes that the word "beer" got it boycotted by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in the 1890s — until testing showed there was next to no alcohol in it, and the boycott ended.

🧢 The Cap Itself

The crown cap was a Baltimore invention: William Painter patented it in 1892 and built the Crown Cork & Seal Company on it. For decades every one carried a disc of natural cork, and bottlers quickly worked out that the top of the cap — the one thing every customer held in their hand — was advertising space. Most were popped, bent and thrown away within seconds of doing their job. An unused one, still flat, still carrying its penny deal, is the one that got missed.

🏢 After The Family

The Hires family sold the company in 1960 to Consolidated Foods, which sold it on to Crush International in 1962. Procter & Gamble bought Crush in 1980; Cadbury Schweppes took the soft drinks in 1989; they became Dr Pepper Snapple Group in 2008, and finally Keurig Dr Pepper. Hires went from the most famous name in root beer to one brand among dozens.

🕯️ How Hires Disappeared

There was no farewell tour. By 2023 Keurig Dr Pepper's own brand list no longer mentioned Hires. The last canning had been done at the American Bottling Company in Ottumwa, Iowa. The last fountain syrup came from Kalil Bottling Company of Tucson, Arizona, which sold its operations to Keurig Dr Pepper on 9 August 2024.

Hires' real legacy is the drink itself: it made "root beer" an American category, the pattern every root beer after it followed. The name that started it is now something you find on a cap like this one.

✅ Condition

New old stock. Unused and never crimped onto a bottle. Lithographed colors bright, lettering crisp, cork liner intact.

🖼️ What People Do With These

• Frame it in a small shadow box with an old root beer bottle or soda-fountain photograph
• Add it to a board of soda and beer caps — the orange Hires cap is the one people point at
• Give it to someone who grew up on Hires, now that they cannot buy it anymore
• Set it in a Philadelphia collection alongside other Philadelphia-made brands
• Use it as a gift topper or ornament for a root beer float lover

❓ Questions People Ask

Can you still buy Hires Root Beer?
No. Keurig Dr Pepper no longer lists it, the last canning was in Ottumwa, Iowa, and the last fountain-syrup bottler sold out in August 2024.

What does "6 for 1¢ with 6 at regular price" mean?
Buy six bottles at the normal price and get another six for a penny — a promotion printed right on the cap.

How old is it?
1930s — Depression-era penny-deal pricing on a cork-lined cap.

Has it been used?
No. It never met a bottle or an opener, and the cork liner is intact.

Who invented root beer?
People brewed root drinks long before him, but Charles Elmer Hires of Philadelphia made root beer a product and a name, starting in 1876.