The cola's of bygone days.

This is a Royal Family Cola bottle my daughter and I found peaking out of a two track road in the mountains.  It must be a really tough bottle, as it was right in the lane of travel.

The area I was in was once sheep country, and sheepherders left some notoriously dirty camps.  Ironically, these messy camps are now real treasures for scavengers of bottles and the like, as they're a lot of bottles and cans in them. They packed stuff in, but they had no incentive to pack it back out.  This big bottle, and it is big, 32 oz or more, could be theirs.

Or it could have been a hunter's, or just somebody who packed it in for a picnic or something.

I don't know much about Royal Family other than that they apparently bottled cola in Denver and in Sheridan, Wyoming.  Before we found this bottle, I'd never heard of them.  It can't be any newer than the 50s, and maybe somewhat older than that.

When we buy cola here, it's Pepsi or Coca-Cola.  But when I was a kid, if my parents bought cola, it was probably Craigmont, the Safeway brand.  We'd drink it, but it wasn't like real Coke.  Indeed, in retrospect, it was awful.  But it was cheap.  Only my father and I drank it, as my mother wasn't a soda fan.  Later, if I was lucky, my father might buy Royal Crown, which I still like but rarely see.

Off brands of soda seem to have disappeared.  Perhaps one more sign that, in spite of what we might think, we've become more affluent as a society and we don't look for discount sodas anymore.  Or maybe we bought Craigmont due to the Great Inflation of the 70s, and we might be sucking discount soda down again soon.  Or maybe it still exists, and I just don't notice it, not being much of a soda drinking myself anymore as it is.