Vintage 1970s NOS Double Cola Bottle Cap 🥤 Seven Up Bottling Hagerstown MD

Double Cola From Hagerstown? 🥤 Vintage 1970s NOS Bottle Cap, Seven Up Bottling, Hagerstown MD

Size: 1 1/4"

🥤 Here's a fun one: a Double Cola cap bottled by the 7-Up bottler in Hagerstown, Maryland. Two rival sodas, one plant. It's never been on a bottle, so the skirt is still uncrimped.

🔍 What's On It

A red top with Double Cola® in big silver letters, and under it the ingredients printed right on the cap: CARBONATED WATER, SUGAR, CARAMEL COLOR, PHOSPHORIC ACID, NATURAL FLAVORINGS, CAFFEINE. Around the skirt in red it reads SEVEN-UP BOTTLING and the company of HAGERSTOWN, MD. with a 217 ZIP code. Inside is a molded plastic liner with a small 18 stamped in the middle.

The ZIP code means it was printed after ZIP codes came in during 1963, and by then molded plastic liners like this one had taken over from cork.

🍾 One Bottler, Two Brands

That's how the soda business worked. The big brands sold syrup and franchises, and the local bottling plant filled bottles for whatever brands it had the rights to in its territory. A town's 7-Up plant might also be bottling an orange, a root beer and, here in Hagerstown, a cola that wasn't Coke or Pepsi.

7 Up itself goes back to Charles Leiper Grigg of St. Louis, who came up with his lemon-lime formula in 1928 and launched it the year before the 1929 crash. It was 7up Lithiated Lemon Soda by 1930, and in 1937 the name became plain 7 Up.

🥤 Double Cola

Double Cola came out of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Charles D. Little and Joe S. Foster, two former Chero-Cola men, started the Good Grape Company in 1922, came up with Marvel Cola and then Jumbo Cola, and in 1933 put their cola in a 12-ounce bottle, twice the size of the other colas, and called it Double-Cola. In 1957 it became the first major soft drink sold in a 16-ounce returnable bottle. The company still tells the story that back in the hard years, Little had the chance to buy Pepsi-Cola and turned it down.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1970s Double Cola crown bottle cap, red with silver lettering and the ingredient list
• Skirt: Seven-Up Bottling, Hagerstown, Maryland
• Plastic 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 or a Hagerstown and Western Maryland shadow box, and a nice little conversation piece for anybody who thinks every cola was Coke or Pepsi.