Antique 1920s Memphis Chaser Cork Bottle Cap 🥤 Lithiated Soda History

What Was Lithiated Soda? 🥤 Antique 1920s Memphis Chaser Cork Bottle Cap

Size: 1 1/4"

🥤 Antique Memphis Chaser Cork Bottle Cap

A green crown with Chaser in dark green script and a long swooping underline, inside a dark green ring. That one word is all it says. Flip it over and it's the real old kind, a pressed composition cork liner, from the years before plastic liners took over in the 1960s. Like every uncrimped crown it measures 1 1/4" across.

🍋 Chaser, the Memphis lithia soda

Chaser was a Memphis original. In 1925 Thomas George Chase of Memphis came up with the formula, and his Chase Bottling Co. at 362 Winchester Avenue bottled it: a lemon-flavored soda with lithium citrate in it. Lithiated drinks were believed to cure indigestion and hangovers, and with a name like Chaser, a drink you'd reach for after a shot, the maker's name and the joke lined up perfectly. Chase's bottles and cases turn up from the 1920s and '30s, and Chaser was still being advertised in the late 1940s.

Chaser wasn't the only soda selling lithium. Charles Leiper Grigg launched a lemon-lime drink in St. Louis the year before the 1929 crash that also claimed lithium citrate; in 1936 the federal government made the maker drop its health claims, and in 1937 it was renamed plain 7 Up. Chaser kept going. It went international in 1956, the Double Cola Company of Chattanooga bought it in 1957, and it disappeared as an American brand after that, until Double Cola brought it back to the U.S. in 2010.

Condition:
This listing is for one randomly selected survivor example. Each cap can show one or more of the following: surface wear, oxidation, and rubbing from long‑term storage, the way old cork‑lined crown caps do.

A real piece of Memphis soda history.