Vintage Cheerwine Bottle Cap 🍒 1980s NOS – West Jefferson NC Bottler – Twist‑Off

Uniquely Southern Since 1917? 🍒 Vintage 1980s NOS Cheerwine Bottle Cap, West Jefferson NC

Size: 1 1/4"

🍒 Cheerwine — Uniquely Southern Since 1917. This is an original, unused 1980s Cheerwine bottle cap from the Dr. Pepper Bottling Co. of West Jefferson, North Carolina, up in the Blue Ridge. Bright yellow with a green crimp, a pair of cherries, and the old slogan "It's Full of Good Cheer." New old stock, never pressed onto a bottle.

🔍 What's on it

On the face: "Since 1917" between two little cherries, Cheerwine in orange script, "It's Full of Good Cheer," and two plump cherries on a leafy stem. Around the green skirt: "TWIST OFF →", "Bottled by Dr. Pepper Bottling Co. West Jefferson, NC 28694," and in smaller type "Produced Under Authority of Carolina Beverage Corp. Salisbury, NC 28146." It's a twist-off crown, so no bottle opener needed. Like every uncrimped crown, it measures 1 1/4 inches across.

🏔️ The West Jefferson plant

What I love about this cap is that the bottler is still going. H.R. Vannoy started the Dr. Pepper Bottling Company in West Jefferson, in Ashe County, in 1937. Carl Colvard and Vannoy ran the plant through the 1940s, and the Vannoy family still owns it today. Its old brick plant, built around 1940, is part of the West Jefferson Historic District on the National Register, and the company still bottles dozens of flavors in glass longnecks, with real cane sugar, including Cheerwine, for the mountain counties around them: Ashe, Avery, Watauga, Wilkes and Alleghany in North Carolina and Grayson County, Virginia.

These caps came out of the old Dr. Pepper bottling plant, the two-story brick building downtown on North Third Avenue that still wears a faded "Dr. Pepper-Grapette Bottling Co." sign. The company itself moved out to a newer plant on NC Highway 163, where it's still bottling today, and caps like this one stayed behind as old stock, never used. The story that came down with them is that they turned up there in the 1990s.

That's how Cheerwine got around. Carolina Beverage in Salisbury made the syrup and owned the brand, and local bottlers like the West Jefferson plant filled the bottles "under authority," right alongside their Dr Pepper, 7 Up and the rest.

🍒 Cheerwine, 1917

Salisbury's soda story starts in 1913, when L.D. Peeler and some other Rowan County businessmen started a Mint Cola bottling franchise in the basement of Peeler's store on Council Street, near the train depot. When Mint Cola went bankrupt, Peeler bought the franchise and built the Carolina Beverage Corporation on it, the same company named on this cap's skirt. In 1917, with sugar short during the war, a flavor salesman from St. Louis sold Peeler a wild cherry flavor, and he turned it into a deep burgundy soda he called Cheerwine, "cheer" for how it made you feel and "wine" for the color. More than a century later the company is still run by Peeler's descendants, the Ritchie family, and Salisbury throws a Cheerwine Festival in its honor. Cheerwine calls itself the oldest soft drink company in the country still run by the same family. For a lot of those years Cheerwine was mostly a western North Carolina drink (folks there are still crazy about it), and it wasn't until 1981 that the company really started pushing out into the neighboring states.

📅 How old is it?

The 1980s, which is how collectors date this yellow-and-green Cheerwine cap, and everything on it fits: the twist-off crown, the five-digit ZIP codes for both towns, and the Carolina Beverage authority line on the skirt.

🔍 Item Details

🍒 Brand: Cheerwine 🏭 Bottler: Dr. Pepper Bottling Co. 📍 Location: West Jefferson, North Carolina 📆 Era: 1980s 🔄 Closure: Twist-off crown ✨ Condition: NOS (unused) 🚚 Shipping: Free shipping

Cheerwine remains one of the most collectible Southern soda brands, and regional bottler caps like this one, unused, from a named mountain bottler, are a small, genuine piece of Southern soda history.