Retro 2000s Sun Drop Citrus Soda Bottle Cap 🥤 NASCAR Era Southern Bottler Advertising, NOS Yellow Crown Cap

Why Does the South Still Defend Sun Drop Against Mountain Dew? 🌞 A Retro 2000s Sun Drop Citrus Soda Twist-Off Crown Cap from the North Carolina Mountains

Size: 1 1/4"

If you grew up anywhere from the Blue Ridge to the Tennessee hills, you've cracked open a Sun Drop on a hot porch and never once looked at the cap. Here it is: a tin crown cap with a bright yellow face and a lime-green skirt, the red Sun Drop script with the registered mark over a pale-green citrus swoosh and two little green sprigs, and CITRUS SODA underneath. Around the skirt in red: TWIST OFF and BOTTLED BY DR PEPPER BOTTLING CO. WEST JEFFERSON, NC 28694. The liner is plain grey and the crimp is untouched - every one I have is unused.

🏔️ West Jefferson

That skirt line is a real place and a real family business. Dr Pepper Bottling of West Jefferson, up in Ashe County in the North Carolina mountains, was started by H.R. Vannoy in 1937 and is still owned by the Vannoy family, still bottling glass longnecks made with cane sugar. My caps came out of the old Dr Pepper plant downtown - the two-story brick building on North Third Avenue that still wears its faded Dr. Pepper-Grapette Bottling Co. sign and is part of the West Jefferson Historic District, run in the 1940s by Carl Colvard and H.R. Vannoy. The company moved out to a newer plant on NC Highway 163 and is still going strong. The five-digit ZIP on the skirt only says 1963 or later - the logo says a lot more. Sun Drop wore a hyphenated Sun-drop logo from 1965 through 2000 and switched to bold block capitals in 2011, and this red script on a yellow oval with the green drops is the one in between: it's the logo across the top of sundrop.com in 2006 and 2007, back when Cadbury Schweppes owned the brand. So these caps are from the 2000s.

🍋 Sun Drop

The story is told that Sun Drop came out of Missouri, from Charles Lazier, a salesman of beverage concentrates, with his son Charles Jr., a lab technician, working out the formula. It was introduced in 1949, and Sun Drop Cola made its debut at a bottlers' conference in Washington, D.C. in 1951. In different corners of the South it went out as Sundrop Golden Cola or Golden Girl Cola, until Crush International bought it in 1970 and made it one brand. Procter & Gamble bought Crush in 1980 and brought out Diet Sun Drop and Cherry-Lemon Sun Drop in 1985, Cadbury Schweppes took over in 1989, and today it's a Keurig Dr Pepper brand that went nationwide in 2011. It never stopped being a Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina drink, though - high caffeine - 64 milligrams in a 12-ounce can - big citrus, and fiercely defended against Mountain Dew and Mello Yello. Collectors today still talk about how all those regional bottlers mean no two eras of Sun Drop caps look quite alike.

🏁 Stock cars

Old-timers around Southern short tracks and speedways recall Sun Drop's bright yellow and green flashing by in the days when stock car racing and Southern sodas were practically the same world. Fans still swap stories about Sun Drop and the Earnhardts, and this time the record backs them up: Dale Earnhardt promoted Sun Drop across the South from the 1970s into the early 1990s, Sun Drop sponsored Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s late model in 1993, and the two got back together for a race at North Wilkesboro in 2022. That's a half-legendary connection that turned out to be true.

🌞 About these

They're the standard 1 1/4 inch crown. Drop one in a cap collection, a North Carolina mountain shelf, or a shadow box with an Earnhardt diecast. The supply is finite - these came out of one old plant, and once these last unused caps are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.