Vintage 1960s Mug Root Beer Bottle Cap 🥤 Embossed Advertising Soda Collectible

How Did MUG Root Beer Go From Belfast to the Bulldog? 🥤 A Vintage MUG Root Beer Crown Bottle Cap, Embossed Red and Gold

Size: 1 1/4"

A red metal crown bottle cap with a gold-outlined shield on top: MUG in big embossed gold letters outlined in white, a dark brown banner reading ROOT BEER in white, and the registered mark. Underneath it's plain gray metal with a pressed liner instead of the old cork, and the crimped teeth are straight and clean - every one I have is unused, never pried off a bottle. One of the pictures shows a second cap turned over so you can see the inside.

🐾 The legend behind the Mug

Old-timers in the soda collecting world trace the MUG name back to a company called Belfast Beverages, founded in San Francisco in 1877 and best known in its early years for sparkling water and ginger ale before it turned its attention to root beer. The story handed down among bottle cap and soda memorabilia collectors holds that MUG Root Beer grew out of that older Belfast line, and the record bears them out: Belfast brought out Belfast Root Beer in 1940, by the 1950s it was Belfast Old Fashioned Mug Root Beer, and then the name got shortened to just Mug. That's why this cap reads plain MUG ROOT BEER, with no Belfast on it at all - it comes from after that change.

PepsiCo bought the brand in 1986, and after that the logo picked up the stout bulldog holding a glass that most people picture today. This cap has just the wordmark on its shield - no mug, no bulldog. In between, the label read Mug Old Fashioned Root Beer for a while, and today Mug is still a PepsiCo brand on the shelf, more than eighty years after Belfast bottled its first root beer.

🌉 A San Francisco root beer

San Francisco in those years was full of independent bottlers, each working its own territory of corner stores, diners and soda fountains, and a brand like Mug reached people through bottlers who filled the glass, crimped on caps like this one and trucked the cases out to the neighborhood grocer. Root beer had a wholesome reputation even then - a family drink, a treat for kids, a float at the counter - and every bottler fought for the cold case by the register.

👑 The crown cap

The crimped crown itself is William Painter's invention. He patented it and started the Crown Cork & Seal Company in Baltimore in 1892, and it beat out the corks and wire bails that leaked the fizz out of bottles. It caught on so fast that crown cap and bottle cap became the same word for most of the next century. The early crowns had cork pads inside; this one has the later pressed liner.

🧢 Kids and caps

Long before anybody worried about recycling a bottle cap, kids were tossing them in cigar boxes and pinning them to corkboards the way they collected baseball cards. Most caps went in the trash the second the bottle opened, which is exactly why a clean, unused one still feels like a find. A good cap is a tiny billboard: one brand, one logo, one inch and a quarter of somebody's advertising budget.

🥤 About these

They're the standard 1 1/4 inch crown. Add one to a cap collection, drop it in a shadow box with an old opener, or give it to somebody who grew up on Mug. The supply is finite - nobody's crimping these MUG caps anymore, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.