Vintage Cherry Coke Bottle Cap 🥤 Chesterman Company Sioux City Iowa Coca-Cola Crown

How Did Cherry Coke Go From Soda-Fountain Trick to Its Own Bottle? 🥤 A Vintage Cherry Coke Bottle Cap, Chesterman Company, Sioux City, Iowa

Size: 1 1/4"

An unused steel crown cap with the cherry Coke logo in white on pink-red - the o is a red cherry - Trade-mark, CHERRY FLAVORED COLA WITH OTHER NATURAL FLAVORS, the ingredient panel (high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose, caramel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffeine) and a code, 1990-1345. Around the bare silver skirt in red: BOTTLED UNDER AUTHORITY OF THE COCA-COLA CO BY CHESTERMAN COMPANY SIOUX CITY IOWA 51102, and the liner is embossed B20. Never crimped onto a bottle.

🍒 Cherry Coke

For decades before it had a trademark, soda jerks behind drugstore and diner fountains were making cherry Coke themselves, squirting cherry syrup into a glass of Coca-Cola because customers kept asking for it. Coca-Cola tried an official version on the public at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, premiered Cherry Coke in February 1985 - the first flavored version of its flagship cola - and took it national that summer. Just two months later, on April 23, 1985, the company swapped its century-old formula for New Coke, and by July it had to bring the original back as Coca-Cola Classic. Every Vanilla Coke, Cherry Vanilla Coke and Coke with Lime since traces back to this one. Even the CAFFEINE on the panel has a story: in 1911 the federal government took Coca-Cola to court in Chattanooga over the caffeine in its formula, a fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1916.

🏭 The Chesterman Company

The bottler on the skirt is older than Coca-Cola itself. Cilo Chesterman started bottling in 1872 in Dyersville, Iowa - the town with the twin-spired Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, down the road from the Field of Dreams - and moved to Sioux City in 1885, trading as Chesterman & Barrow, then Chesterman & Lane, and as the Chesterman Company from 1899. In 1904, under Cilo's son C. B. Chesterman, it took the Coca-Cola franchise for Sioux City; company history holds that Coke sold slowly enough at first that they stepped back from it for a while and picked it up for good around 1919. By the 1940s they'd retired their own sarsaparilla, vanilla and strawberry sodas to bottle Coca-Cola products only. It's still family owned by Cilo's descendants, and the family story goes that brothers Jay and Cy got the business through hard years by selling off a horse and buggy.

🌽 Sioux City

Sioux City is old river country - the Floyd Monument there, for Sergeant Charles Floyd of the Lewis and Clark expedition, was named the very first National Historic Landmark in the country in 1960. Cilo got to Sioux City a year after its stockyards opened in 1884 - at their peak the third largest in the country, and in 1924 they handled 3.7 million hogs. In the late 1880s the town built its famous Corn Palaces, the 1889 one 220 feet tall with the city's first elevator. And in July 1989 the whole country watched Sioux City when United Flight 232, crippled with no hydraulics, came down at Sioux Gateway Airport and 184 of the 296 aboard survived, thanks to the crew and a town that was ready.

📅 How old is it?

Cherry Coke dates from 1985, so this cap is 1985 or later, and the 51102 ZIP code and the ingredient panel fit that era. The 1990-1345 printed on the face is a code - nothing on the cap says what it stands for.

🥤 About these

Every one I have is this same unused cap, 1 1/4 inches across. It's a fun one for a Coca-Cola collection, a cap collection, a shadow box, or anybody from Sioux City or Siouxland. The supply is finite - nobody's printing these Chesterman caps anymore, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.