Tokens and medals

By Lew Cady

To most people, Mardi Gras is a time of merry-making, of parading down the streets of New Orleans throwing out candy, trinkets, and modern-day doubloons.

But to people who collect brewery tokens and medals, Mardi Gras has long been a time to add to the old collection. Many of those doubloons have borne the names of breweries-A-B, Coors, Miller, Schlitz, New Orleans' own Jackson Brewing, and the local micro, Crescent City.

"The odd thing about it," observes Jim McCoy, a man who has many a Mardi Gras doubloon in his collection, "is that I've never seen a doubloon from Dixie."

McCoy notes that doubloons also come from Mardi Gras celebrations in Galveston and Mobile. A former numismatist, McCoy has become a dedicated brewmismatist. To coin a word.

He flips through his collection of over 400 tokens and medals displayed like rare coins in a loose-leaf binder and points out that brewery tokens and medals can be as small as pennies or as large as silver dollars. Although the majority of these are just souvenirs or good luck pieces handed out by breweries, some commemorate specific event like the World's Fair and the centennial of the Statue of Liberty-even Halley's comet.

Anheuser-Busch issued tokens to celebrate the production of 10,000,000 barrels of beer. Ten million! In one year. The year was 1964.

There are also spinner tokens to determine who buys the next round. And all sorts of sports-oriented tokens-including one put out by American Beer that bore the Orioles' 1954 home schedule.

The oldest brewery tokens of all came from the 1860s when some breweries coped with the shortage of coins during the Civil War by issuing their own. Not all of McCoy's tokens were issued as souvenirs. The ones from Holy Cow Casino & Brewery in Las Vegas and the Wild West Brewery in Cripple Creek, CO, are actually dollar slot tokens.

Coin dealers are the primary source of brewery tokens and medals, which range in cost from 50 cents to $50, with most at the lower end of the scale.

Lew Cady is the author of a book about beer can collecting cleverly titled "Beer Can Collecting."