Peek! It's me

I was offline last night (for the most part) due to a package I got in the mail.  Y'see, I mentioned once before I've had a jones to get back into my long neglected beer cap collection.  I started this about the same time Time Machine kicked off (1975, not last year) when I started wanting to get into the beer can collecting thing without the competition- a niche to myself, IOW.  Simple enough to strat as we were always down at the Zulu Tavern and Cliff Coulardot and Bill Riley ( God rest both those beautiful men) would save the week's caps for me to go through.  It was shortly thereafter that I learned the seats of my dad's '37 Chevy were a repository for old beer caps- all of them with the cork insides.  Later I found out behind our shed a 24 oz Falstaff bottle with a tall twist cap that had the Georgia state seal for taxes paid on it.  This openned the world of state seal caps; and about this time in 1976 I went with my brother's family to Florida and virtually doubled my collection by the power of Florida and Georgia state seals.  Over the years I looked forward to spring so I could comb the roadsides and parking lots.  My nephew helped out (not by my request) by openning bottles IN THE STORE. ("you have this one?"  "No..."  PSSSSSHH....)

Time went on and I began wasting my time with girls (for all the good it did me), and for decades the collection has drifted through the 225-280 range without my concentrated attention.  Still, they were the top of my prized possessions all those years, and if I found something I would grab it- not always ever getting around to doing something with it.  A few weeks ago, though, they began to sing softly to me once again, and were encouraged when Laurie's brother and brother in law decided to experiment with one of those beers-of-the-world six packs from which I claimed the caps.  I had also recently found a couple interesting specimens nearby, and it got me looking.  Laurie, as fortune would have it, had just openned an e-bay account, and I discovered a handfull of people actually selling lots of 20, 50, even 500 mixed caps.  Temptation winning out, I spent around 8 bucks on a lot of 100, figuring I wouldn't get much out of it after weeding out 35-40 common caps.

Seventy-eight new caps went into the collection last night- expanding the collection by 26%!  Foreign jobbies (with a tip of the hat to Laurie for helping figure out what several of them were), microbreweries and crafters, and quite a few new variations on old themes.  My favorites were not the more exotic, but the more common.  A Budweiser twist cap like a million others, but missing the A with the eagle inside;  a Miller MGD that had the © on the Miller and the MGD, where the one I already had had nothing on the Miller and aTM on the MGD.  A Yeungling, which I hadn't thought about since the old can collecting days.

There are still a handfull I cannot ID and add to the collection.  A blue cap with a big red ! in the middle, no writing;  a silver shark silhouette on a pink field (which I suspect might not be beer, and thus disqualified; and a set of three with green spiral leading into a tiny red center, with somewhat odd sayings in the inside" Keep the flowers, send me Growlers"; "Peel off your skin to see we're all kin"; Land (sic) your ear to someone who's dear").  Some other highlights include an outfit called Smuttynose brewery, whose cap has a seal looking at you with a mountain at its back, and the caption "Make mine a Smutty".

Some dude from Germany has a site where he shows his collection of 68,000 + !!!! I'm going to see if he can help with some of my new oddballs.