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Size: 1 1/4"
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Size: 1 1/4"
Turn this cap on its edge and read the skirt: "BOTTLED BY DR. PEPPER BOTTLING CO. WEST JEFFERSON, NC." On top is the rooster-and-bull emblem of Cock 'n Bull, the ginger beer born behind the bar of a Sunset Strip tavern where, as the story goes, the Moscow Mule was mixed to clear out a basement full of unsold stock. That tavern closed on October 22, 1987, fifty years to the day after it opened. This crown was made for bottles of that ginger beer filled clear across the country, in a small Ashe County mountain town, at a family bottling plant that opened the same year the tavern did.
This is a litho-printed metal crown cap with a red face. "COCK" arches across the top in white capitals and "BULL" runs along the bottom, followed by a registered trademark symbol. Between them, two heads square off. On the left, a wide-eyed rooster with a red comb throws his beak open, red tongue out. On the right, a white bull with curved horns and a red ring through his nose answers with his own mouth open. A small black circle between them holds a white "'n."
The skirt carries its own printing in white:
The inside is plain gold-toned metal around a round sealing liner. The cap is new old stock: the flutes still stand straight, never crimped onto a bottle and never twisted off one.
Two details on the skirt help place it. The ZIP code system started on July 1, 1963, so the printing is from 1963 or later. And "TWIST OFF" marks a twist-off crown, the version pressed around a threaded bottle neck so it can be removed by hand instead of pried with an opener. But the artwork is what settles it: those cartoon rooster and bull heads are the Cock 'n Bull design the brand first used at the very end of 2003, according to its own trademark registration, so this is a 2000s crown. The old bottles from the restaurant days wore a plain script label instead, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History even keeps a 1949 Cock'N Bull ginger beer bottle in its collection.
Brothers Jack and Percy Morgan opened the Cock 'n Bull at 9170 Sunset Boulevard on October 22, 1937, in a building put up the year before. They were the sons of a wealthy British expatriate and his American wife, raised in a Tudor mansion in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they built their tavern as an English pub. Its sign was a pub-style picture of a rooster and a bull; Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt caught it in 1937, mounted above a big window beside the tavern's red front door.
For half a century it was a clubhouse for Hollywood. A 1949 Photoplay photo showed Robert Mitchum, Barbara Hale and Bill Williams dining there. Hedda Hopper reported in 1947 that Greer Garson took her Moscow Mules in "a glass of alarmingly huge proportions." Director Richard Bare recalled approaching a young woman at the bar without knowing who she was, and hearing, "My name is Kim Novak." Dick Martin tended bar there before he became half of the comedy team Rowan and Martin, and Laugh-In producer George Schlatter was a regular. The brand's own history adds Jack Webb, Richard Burton, Jim Morrison and Rod Stewart to the roll.
Bare, who said he met three of his wives at the Cock 'n Bull, also painted a "V for Victory" on one of its walls during World War II. When the end came, the regulars held a wake from 11 in the morning until closing. KCBS commentator Bill Stout summed the place up: "Bad behavior was rare," and "The place had class." On the way out, patrons took down the memorial plaque listing departed regulars, Dragnet creator Jack Webb among them, and carried it to the Scandia restaurant, which closed a year or so later.
Jack Morgan made his own ginger beer at the restaurant, and it would go on to become a national brand. John G. Martin of the spirits firm Heublein had bought the American license for Smirnoff vodka from Rudolph Kunett in 1938, reportedly for $14,000, and Americans were not buying it. Put those two problems together and you get the legend.
The version West Hollywood historians tell dates the drink to 1940 at the Cock 'n Bull. Head bartender Wes Price later claimed he mixed the first one himself, with no grand plan at all: "I just wanted to clean out the basement. I was trying to get rid of a lot of dead stock." In his telling that stock was Cock 'n Bull ginger beer the tavern made and 100 cases of vodka, and he served the first Mule to actor Broderick Crawford. It "caught on like wildfire."
A second story, printed in the New York Herald Tribune in 1948, puts the invention at Manhattan's Chatham Hotel in 1941, where Morgan, as president of Cock 'n Bull Products, Martin, as president of G.F. Heublein Brothers, and Kunett of the Pierre Smirnoff division worked out vodka, ginger beer and citrus in a few days. Even the copper mug has rival claimants; Sophie Berezinski said she supplied the mugs from the Moscow Copper Company. Both accounts put Jack Morgan's ginger beer in the glass.
Martin sold it bar by bar. He carried one of the new Polaroid cameras from saloon to saloon, photographed each bartender holding a copper mug and a bottle of Smirnoff, left one print with the owner and kept another to show the next bar that the drink was spreading. The Mule caught on in Los Angeles and in Reno, and it helped launch America's taste for vodka.
The Morgans picked a name with a wink in it. A "cock and bull story" is a far-fetched tale of dubious truth, and the phrase is old: John Day's 1608 play Law-trickes has a character complain, "What a tale of a cock and a bull he told my father." One old dictionary of phrase and fable called it a corruption of "concocted and bully" story.
The favorite legend puts its birthplace in Stony Stratford, England, on the old Watling Street coaching road, where two rival inns, The Cock and The Bull, served travelers changing horses between London and Birmingham. The story goes that passengers swapped news and rumor between the two, each inn trying to outdo the other with the wilder tale, until a "cock and bull story" meant a yarn too good to be true. The Cock dates to at least 1470 and The Bull to before 1600. Word historians call it folk etymology, but it is still the tale told in Stony Stratford.
West Jefferson sits in Ashe County in the Blue Ridge, in a valley between Mount Jefferson and Paddy Mountain. It exists because of a railroad: the Norfolk and Western line nicknamed the Virginia Creeper made it a major stop, and the town incorporated in 1909. It once had the only cheese factory in the southeastern United States. Its population in 2020 was 1,279.
H.R. Vannoy founded the West Jefferson Dr. Pepper Bottling Co. in 1937, and his family still owns it. His son Kyle Vannoy spent 65 years in the business before his death in 2018. The plant is known for sweetening its sodas with pure cane sugar instead of corn syrup, and it is one of only two bottlers outside the Pepsi system permitted to produce Mountain Dew. Small independent franchise bottlers like this one filled their lines with many brands besides their namesake, and this cap shows Cock 'n Bull ginger beer was one of them. These came out of the old Dr Pepper bottling plant downtown in West Jefferson, which is how they've stayed flat and bright, never crimped onto a bottle. The town's historic district nomination lists the plant's two-story brick building at 108-110 North Third Avenue, built about 1940, with a "Dr. Pepper-Grapette Bottling Co." sign on its south wing, and notes it was operated by Carl Colvard and H.R. Vannoy in the 1940s.
William Painter patented the crown cork on February 2, 1892, as U.S. Patent 468,258. His original design had 24 teeth and a cork seal with a paper backing; the standard crown settled on 21 teeth, and modern liners are plastic rather than cork. The twist-off crown seen here came much later, pressed around screw threads so a thirsty customer could open a bottle bare-handed.
The skirt reads "Bottled by Dr. Pepper Bottling Co. West Jefferson, NC," the family-owned bottler in Ashe County, North Carolina.
It is a 2000s crown. The rooster-and-bull head design on it was first used at the end of 2003, according to the brand's trademark registration.
Yes. It is new old stock and was never put on a bottle.
Yes. Both origin accounts, the Sunset Strip tavern in 1940 and the Chatham Hotel meeting in 1941, center on Jack Morgan's Cock 'n Bull ginger beer mixed with vodka and citrus.
No. It closed on October 22, 1987, exactly fifty years after opening at 9170 Sunset Boulevard.
A far-fetched story. The phrase appears in print by 1608, and the popular legend traces it to two rival coaching inns in Stony Stratford, England.
Yes. The brand is sold today by C-B Beverage Corp.
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