OnTap Magazine

FEATURE • C R O W N I N G • When you get your hands on a new bottle of beer, you’re probably most excited about the liquid within. Not so for all On Tap readers though. Our editor Lucy Corne sits down for a chat with South Africa’s biggest bottle cap collectors. C ollectors have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I once knew a guy who had to buy a bigger apartment to house his extensive book collection. When I asked him about his favourite book, he looked surprised. “I don’t read them – it would lower the value if they’d been thumbed!” Of course, he would never have dreamt of selling his collection either and to me this makes no sense. I came to the conclusion that collectors simply like collecting things, but as I learned when I recently met South Africa’s top collectors of bottle caps, there is much more to it. “ e cap is just the start of the story,” says Cheryl Borchardt. She and her husband, Jonathan, have over 7900 crown caps in their collection. Some come from wine coolers, soft drinks, water or even milk, but the bulk of the caps started out on the top of a beer bottle. INSPIRED BY A BEER FEST It all began with a gift. It was the late 1990s and Cheryl’s sister was visiting from Canada. In her luggage was a bottle of Molson Canadian. For a beer lover it’s a fairly innocuous beer – the Canadian equivalent to a Castle Lager – but the Borchardts took a fancy to the cap, adorned with a red maple leaf. “I put it on the wall,” says Cheryl. “ en every time my sister would visit, she would bring beers and we’d put the caps on the wall along with others we’d collected. We had 150 or so and then they started to rust, so we took them down and that was that.” But of course, it wasn’t. e Borchardts continued to casually collect, keeping the caps in a wardrobe in the spare bedroom. “We had 472 di erent caps,” says Cheryl. “And one day I randomly googled ‘bottle cap collectors’ and found a club, CrownCaps.info. We joined and quickly made connections with collectors from around the world who were all looking for African caps, but we didn’t have any stock to trade.” If nding the online club was the igniter, then it was the Cape Town Festival of Beer that really fanned the ames. “We went to the festival in 2013 and came back inspired,” says Jonathan, explaining how he sampled as many beers as he could and hunted around the stands for extra caps. Soon afterwards they packed up some 150 caps, headed to the post o ce and became a part of this global community of collectors. Since then they have conducted more The cap is just the start of the story 26 | Spring 2018 | ontapmag.co.za