A trip to Granny & Grumpa's Antiques...and a few bottle additions !

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CanadianBottles

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Ooh, I love that Malkin's Best bottle! That may be my favourite out of the bunch because I never had any idea that anything like that existed. I'm well aware of Malkin's Best but I never had any idea that they were in any way involved in the soda business, even if it was just extract. I very rarely see paper label sodas from BC. The only one I regularly see is the incredibly valuable Felix paper label. It's odd that B.C.'s most common paper label soda is also its most valuable ABM soda (as far as I know anyway, there's a rare Felix ACL that might compete). I've got a couple of dug BC embossed soda bottles with just the hint of paper labels, I wish so much that I could make out what they said.

Nanaimo Bottling Works was a very odd company, because unlike most companies with bottles that are very difficult to acquire they were around for several decades. I'm not sure how early they started but they have a couple of very scarce bottles that appear to date from the 10's or 20's, then they disappear until the shield ACL shows up, and their bottles remain hard to find until the fifties when that bottle cap ACL shows up and that one seems to be everywhere. And then they go out of business around that time when the number of bottles implies they were just getting successful. One thing I've learned about NBW though is that they were a franchise bottler for Orange Crush and a few other drinks, so it's possible that they didn't do much bottling of their own lines of soda until right around the time of their demise.
 

Canadacan

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You know it!....that is ..that the Malkin's belongs in a soda collection! ;)....I would love to find other flavors! You are probably right about NBW...maybe they did sell more of the Crush branded stuff then their own.
 

Canadacan

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Thanks Bass Assissin!.... I was back picking 2 weekends ago and brought home a few more. I was happy to add two more paper labels, the 2 Way and the Low Cal Canada Dry ginger ale.

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CanadianBottles

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Hey look at that, a Pure Spring bottle all the way out there! I don't remember ever seeing any Pure Spring bottles in BC but I'm not surprised that one made it out that far, since they're so ubiquitous here. Apparently at one point they were distributing pretty far west too, though not that far.
 

Canadacan

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It seems really hard to track down any info related to the distribution of Pure Spring, but they were bought out by Crush in the mid 1960's so I think it would be possible or even likely they distributed in the lower mainland. I do have a Pure Spring Sign dated 1968 that I picked up a couple of months ago. One thing I can say is the bottles I have all appear to be made at the Hamilton plant.
A good ol search on the newspaper archives would be needed to see what shows ups...would be nice to have definitive proof.
 

CanadianBottles

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I'm fairly certain that Pure Spring didn't distribute west of Saskatchewan or Manitoba, at least from what I've heard. Maybe Alberta, but I have my doubts. They were owned by Crush but they still operated pretty much independently. I've never seen a Pure Spring item with the name "Orange Crush" in the fine print, they were still using "The Pure Spring Company" or some variation of that up until the 90's when they disappeared. They weren't an Orange Crush brand like Sprite is a Coke brand, they had a very large number of their own unique drinks and brands. I should do more research on Pure Spring one of these days. They never really interested me too much, oddly enough, despite being by far the most popular local soda in this area. I guess the bottles just tend to be a bit monotonous unless you find some of their more exotic brands or old paper label bottles.
 

Canadacan

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Pure Spring is one of those brands I never really meant to collect!...but it crept into the collection somehow!.. lol. The 30oz bottle I picked up in Nanaimo BC probably in about 1990 ..so I've had it a while now....the two 10oz bottles I got from a friend in Ontario a couple of years ago.

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This is the can photo from the Brio post.

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