Monday, June 8, 2009

Cassin's Grape Brandy Bitters


This advertisement was taken from the July 1, 1868 copy of the San Francisco Examiner. It would be nice to go back in time and drop into your local liquor wholesaler and pick up a couple of cases of Cassin's for display one-hundred and forty years later. I especially like the Important to Country Merchants, now if we could just get a list of which merchants ordered heavily in the smallest of towns we would have something to dig into......literally.

2 comments:

  1. John, Cool ad you turned-up. So then theoretically, there should be Cassins too in the same places where these whiskey merchants distributed heavily. Places where there are KY Gems, Pride of KY's, even those these 1/5's are a little later the agents may have had the market in certain towns for a number of yrs. Come to think of it, there were several KY Gems dug in West Oakland yrs ago, and just a few blocks away a mint Cassins Bitters came out... Gems and Cassins running in the same locales,,, I can think of another town in the Valley where this also has occured... Hmmm, very interesting ! We do know that Bradley & Cockrill were located right next door on Front St to the Cassin Bros in 1869 too..

    ReplyDelete
  2. A Sacramento paper also has a Cassin's ad with a listing of those city's proprietors that were retailers for this bitters also, not as extensive as the S.F. papers listing but still pretty impressive.
    Although the product was marketed and produced for a short period of time in its origiinal container, the time frame in which some of these bottles are being unearthed just indicates that they were not necessarily sold immediately to the public upon purchase by these liquor wholesale/retail dealers. Obviously when these bottles are uncovered in privies and trash pits with bottles of later dates, it goes to show that they were probably sitting on shelves for quite some time before being sold and consumed.

    ReplyDelete