By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Soda’s reputation has fallen a bit flat lately: The all-American beverage most recently made headlines due to an FDA investigation of a potential carcinogen, commonly called "caramel coloring," used in many soft-drink recipes. This bit of drama follows other recent stories that paint an unflattering picture of the soda industry, including New York’s attempt to ban super-sized drinks, the eviction of soda machines from many public schools, and a spate of new soda-tax proposals. All these...

Bill Lindsey on How To Read a Bottle

By Maribeth Keane — My maternal grandfather and uncle got into bottles in about 1965 or ‘66 when I was in high school, and we started digging. My uncle was in Arizona, near some of the old mining camps there. Those were the glory days of bottle digging. People had access with four-wheel drive vehicles and gas was cheap and time-off was more abundant. Then years passed and people started really hitting the ghost towns and mining camps and logging camps of the West. Anyway, we started by digging some of the...

Beer and Soda Bottle Opener Bliss

By Maribeth Keane — My mother brought home a bunch of openers back in 1977, and that got me started collecting. I thought it would be pretty neat to do because nobody else was collecting them. Then I heard about a national club in 1982, and found out there were hundreds of others collecting bottle openers. The club is called Just For Openers, and we have about 250 members. So much for being the only one! Bottle openers were introduced around 1894, when they put the first bottle caps on bottles. They...