Vintage 1960s Pequot Bitter Lemon 🍋 Soda Cork Bottle Cap

Remember Pequot Bitter Lemon? 🍋 Vintage 1960s Soda Cork Bottle Cap, NOS

Size: 1 1/4"

🍋 A bright lime-green cap with a swirl at the top and nothing on the face but BITTER LEMON. Funny thing is, the soda company's name isn't on the front at all. It's around the edge. This one's never been on a bottle, so the skirt is still flared and the cork liner is inside.

🔍 What's on it

A lime field with a silver ribbon forming a Y, two arms up to the rim and a notched tail at the bottom, and at the top a silver ring holding a blue-and-white swirl, a lot like a yin-yang. BITTER on the left and LEMON on the right in dark navy. Inside is a plain composition cork liner.

On catalogued copies of this cap the little print around the skirt reads BOTTLED BY THE PEQUOT SPRING WATER CO., GLASTONBURY, CONN. 06033 and CONTAINS: CARBONATED WATER, SUGAR, CITRIC ACID, TARTARIC ACID, LEMON & LIME JUICE & QUININE SALTS. There's a reason the ingredients are on the cap. Pequot's own bottles of that era say on the back, "INGREDIENTS AND NAME OF FLAVOR DESIGNATED ON CROWN." One plain bottle did every flavor, and the cap told you which one you had. Of the twenty Pequot crowns collectors have catalogued, this is the only one without Pequot on its face.

🌊 Pequot Spring Water Co., Glastonbury

The Pequot Spring Water Company was incorporated in Connecticut in April 1916, started, as one Glastonbury native remembered it, by the Roser family, bottling soda from the spring on Spring Street Extension. The same writer grew up with the Pequot truck coming to the door in the 1960s and 70s with whatever flavors Mom had ordered, cork-capped bottles packed twelve to a heavy wooden crate, and the empties went back to the plant to be refilled.

And here's the legend: the local Indians were said to believe the spring had magical powers. Fittingly, Glastonbury is named after Glastonbury in Somerset, England, the town of the Chalice Well, whose water is reputed to heal. The company's name is borrowed, too. Glastonbury's own people were the Wangunk, and the Pequot lived in southeastern Connecticut, but Pequot was the name everybody knew.

Pequot ended up in court over a 1961 wedding. At a wedding reception that August, guests at the bride's table spotted something swimming in a quart of Pequot grape soda, the bride got sick, and the lawsuit went all the way to an appeals court in 1963. By the 1990s it was a spring-water business, and the company was dissolved in 1999.

🍸 Bitter Lemon

Schweppes brought out its bitter lemon in 1957, and it reached North America as a mixer in the early 1960s. The bitterness comes from the lemon pith plus quinine, the same thing that's in tonic water, which is why QUININE SALTS shows up in the ingredients. Little regional bottlers all over made their own to keep up, and Pequot was one of them.

📅 When

The 06033 ZIP code on the skirt means the design is 1963 or later, and cork liners were on their way out of bottle caps by the middle of the decade, though small bottlers like Pequot hung onto them a little longer. That puts it in the 1960s.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1960s Pequot Bitter Lemon crown bottle cap, Glastonbury, Connecticut
• Lime green, silver, blue and navy, ribbon and swirl design
• Cork lined, never crimped onto a bottle, New Old Stock
• About 1 1/4" across
• You'll get one cap like the ones shown

🖼️ It's a great one for a soda cap collection, a Connecticut shadow box, or anybody who mixes a good gin and bitter lemon.