(I was going to title this thread “How can I date an old beer can?” but I KNEW that would yield smart-aleck responses along the lines of “just ask the beer can out and hope for the best.”)
Anyway, I’m having some work done on my house, and one of the workers found an old Coors beer can up in the attic crawlspace. It’s old enough to have had an old-style pop top, but not old enough to have required a church key. Beyond that, and the age of the house (built in the mid-70s), I don’t know how to narrow its age down any further.
Is there somebody here on the Dope who knows what I can look for on this can to try to figure out precisely how old it is?
Edited to add: It’s actually a yellow-bellied Coors Banquet can, which apparently was the light beer that predated the silver-can Coors Light.
I collected cans through the end of the 70’s. There were plenty of steel beer cans in distribution. They were way behind the soft drink companies when converting to aluminum.
I would say you should email someone at Coors with a picture and see if they can help you. A few years ago I ran across an old bottle of Makers Mark and emailed them and they dated it to +/- 5 years just based on some of the wording on the label.
If it’s one of the “pushbutton” cans with the press-in discs on top rather than a pull-tab, it would be from the range of 1974 to 1977 or so. The introduction was in 1974, but I can’t find a firm cite on when the pushbuttons were discontinued because customers didn’t like them other than “a couple of years later.”
Another clue would be if the can has a UPC code - if so, it’s from 1978 or beyond.
The only time I have ever been to Denver was the summer of 1974. Me and a couple of distant relatives spent a night drinking Coors, it was not available up here in Washington state at the time so it was new to me. The can you describe sounds exactly like the cans we drank from.