Retro Havana Cola Key Lime Cola Soda Bottle Cap 🥤 Winter Park FL, Defunct Brand

A Bottle Cap That Sells a Website? 🥤 Retro Havana Cola Key Lime Cola Bottle Cap, Winter Park FL

Size: 1 1/4"

🥤 A bottle cap that tries to sell you a website. Around the top it reads BUY HAVANA PRODUCTS ON LINE; around the bottom, HAVANACOLA.COM. Between them, on a black disc ringed with dots and flanked by two stars, a silhouette in a snap-brim fedora and open collar — no face, just the hat. Almost nobody was printing a web address on a crown cap when this was made, and “on line” is still two words.

🍋 What Havana Cola actually was

Not a corporate product. Havana Cola was created by America Vaughan of Winter Park, Florida, and has been going since 1993. She sold it as “The Original Key Lime Cola”: a cola made with pure cane sugar instead of corn syrup and real Key lime juice, bottled in 12-ounce flint glass with original hand-drawn labels. The line grew to include Diet Havana Cola, Havana Mojito, Diet Havana Mojito and Havana Libre Sangria.

It was sold the way a small brand has to sell: mail order, a website, a handful of local counters — a Winter Park café, a neighborhood grocery — and whatever supermarket you could talk into stocking it. The company even put its name on a NASCAR car. BevNET’s brand database now lists Havana Cola as no longer on the market, though the brand’s own site and social pages have kept posting.

💻 Why the cap is the interesting part

Look at what this crown is being asked to do. A bottle cap is the cheapest surface in the beverage business and the first thing thrown away — and a small Florida maker used all of it as an advertisement for a URL. No flavor claim, no slogan about taste, no bottler town: just a face-free logo and an instruction to go buy it on the internet.

That is what dates it. Cane-sugar craft sodas and tiny independents were the first to treat the web as a distribution channel rather than a brochure, because they could not get on a shelf any other way. By 2001 the local press was telling Orlando readers that the website was where you bought this cola. A cap like this is from that stretch — the brand’s online-selling years — not from an era of Florida bottling works and painted-label bottles.

🧷 Details

Unused crown cap, printed tin-plate, plain gold liner inside — never crimped onto a bottle
Face: silhouette in a fedora on a black disc, dotted inner ring, a star either side
Rim text: BUY HAVANA PRODUCTS ON LINE · HAVANACOLA.COM
A small code, 18-2, is stamped on the skirt

❓ Questions People Ask

Is this an old Cuban cap? No. It is a Florida soda brand named Havana, made in Winter Park.

How old is it? The brand dates from 1993 and this cap advertises its web address and online ordering, so it belongs to the brand’s internet-selling years rather than to any earlier period of American bottling.

Does the 18-2 mean anything? It is a small stamped code on the skirt of the cap; nothing else on the cap dates it.

Is the brand gone? BevNET lists it as off the market. The name and the website have outlasted the shelf.

🏡 Good for soda and crown-cap collectors, Florida and Orlando-area brand collections, craft and independent beverage history, early e-commerce and dot-com-era packaging collections, bar and shadow-box display, and resin and craft work.