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"

Here's a bottle cap doing a job no bottle cap was built for: selling a website. Across the top it says BUY HAVANA PRODUCTS ON LINE, and around the bottom, HAVANACOLA.COM. In the middle, on a black disc with a ring of dots and a star on each side, there's a man in a snap-brim fedora and an open collar - no face, just the hat and the attitude. Hardly anybody was putting a web address on a crown back then, and on line is still two words.

Every one I have is unused and never crimped, with a plain gold liner inside and a little 18-2 stamped on the skirt.

🍋 America Vaughan's key lime cola

Havana Cola wasn't a big company's idea. America Vaughan of Winter Park, Florida came up with it, and it's been around since 1993 - The Original Key Lime Cola, she called it, made with pure cane sugar instead of corn syrup and real Key lime juice, in 12-ounce clear glass bottles with hand-drawn labels. Its own logo called it a virgin Cuba Libre. The line grew to Diet Havana Cola, Havana Mojito, Diet Havana Mojito and Havana Libre Sangria.

She sold it the way a little brand has to: mail order, the website, a couple of local counters like the Powerhouse Cafe in Winter Park and a neighborhood grocery, and any supermarket she could talk into it. Havana Cola even had its name on a NASCAR car. BevNET's brand list now has it as off the market, though the name and the website have outlasted the shelf.

🇨🇺 The story on the label

The brand tells its own origin story, and it's a good one. The way the label tells it, the story starts in 1898, when Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders brought the first bottled cola to Cuba, and cola, rum and Key lime juice got mixed together for the first time to toast the liberation of Havana. Whether it happened just that way, it's the story every Cuba Libre drinker has heard some version of - and Havana Cola left the rum out and kept the rest.

💻 Why a cap is the right place for a URL

A bottle cap is the cheapest bit of printing in the whole drink business and the first thing in the trash, and a little Florida maker spent every inch of this one on a web address. No flavor, no slogan, no bottler town - just the hat man and go buy it online. That's what dates it. Small cane-sugar sodas were among the first to use the web as a way to sell, not just a brochure, because a shelf was hard to get. By October 2001 the Orlando Weekly was telling readers the website was where to buy it. This cap is from those online-selling years, not from any old Florida bottling works.

🥤 About these

It's a standard 1 1/4 inch crown. Add it to a cap board, put it with your Florida and Orlando things, or give it to the Cuba Libre drinker in your life. The supply is finite - once these last unused Havana Cola caps are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.