| Many breweries who were early adopters of
beer cans chose cone top cans so they could use their existing bottling
equipment. The Crown Cork & Seal company produced bottle caps starting
in 1892, long before they started manufacturing beer cans. The cans
they manufactured (J-Spouts and Crowntainers) beginning in 1937 used their
bottle caps, so it was a great marketing model for the company. The caps for
this era of cone top cans all had a cork lining to keep the liquid contents
from leaking out. In the 60's, cork-lined caps gave way to
plastic-lined caps.
Bottle caps themselves are very
collectible. There are many people who collect just bottle caps (also
know as "crowns") and hundreds of caps are traded on eBay everyday.
This photo
gallery contains individual pictures of the caps I have on my crowntainers.
I have caps on 98% of my cans. I try
to find the "correct" cap, or at least an appropriate cap, to match the can.
When I find one that is a closer match or
in better condition, I upgrade the cap, pry off the old one and put the new
cap on the can. Some states like Pennsylvania and Ohio required
generic "state" caps, so in some cases I chose to used a "technically
inappropriate" cap which had the breweries' brand name or logo instead of
the generic state cap. Please let me know if you have information on
whether any of my caps are, or are not, the proper cap for the can.
I have separated my cap photos onto several
pages to reduce the load time for each page.
The numbers below each picture is a reference to the crowntainer photo in
the United States Beer Cans book. Click on any individual cap
to see a larger picture and use your browser's Back button to return.
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