Cans from the Wally Gilbert collection

October 29, 2006. California zips/tabs from the Wally Gilbert collection. Some of these are duplicates, but many are either different breweries, lid variations, or canning code variations which will be going into my collection. All of them have a California mandatory. 950 miles, one day, round trip drive to San Diego area but brought home 181 cans total, and definitely worth it!

Updated August 2011. Ted Larsen and I am assuming a number of other collectors had already cherry picked all the super rare cans (e.g. Class Pilsner) at least a couple months before I made my trip to San Diego. However, I keep thinking back that even after all the "good" cans were gone, there were still literally 10,000s of cans still there, and still a number of gems. The story I was told Wally would often visit the Maier brewing company, and there were cases and cases and cases of air-filled Maier tabs still stacked under his crawl space when I left. There have been many, many times I have thought back and ask myself "Why didn't you make an offer on all those remaining cans" and I sure hope majority of them didn't hit a landfill somewhere...

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