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anamardoll, trust me, it's just best to stay away from beer. I've been dry almost my entire life, and I'm happy for it.
Now, back to the original topic, and speaking of bottle caps as currency, one of the topics that isn't touched on much is how the monetary system will work during that period. Obviously you'll start out with bartering for things with things, as even gold and silver won't be worth poo during the initial stages as people want food and survival items vs shiny stuff.
Only once things settle down into a more stable system, and almost certainly when long distance trade becomes a reality again (long distance being 20+ miles in a low/no tech society, or 100-200+ in a mid-tech society with motorized transport) will gold, silver, gems, and other items become viable currency. It's unlikely that you'd see any kind of paper fiat currency or payment method in the first 100 years, or even the first 200, as it takes a strong central government to make that viable.
Even so paper currency only came into mainstream use in the mid 1600's. Before that the most you had was a note of credit that went between two banks, or outposts, or wherever. I think it was the Templars that originally created the idea of paper fiat currency with their creative coded bank note system, and Sweden (or at least the area that became Sweden) was the first to officially create the world's first completely fiat currency system.
So during the initial survival and recovery period, you'd be doing a lot of barter and trading just like they did back in colonial days. Believe it or not, except in the big cities of America, most commerce centered around barter. The farther out into the boonies you got, the less currency you saw, and the more barter became the sole way to trade what you had for what you needed. I really think it'd be an important element of any survival situation, yet I see so few books that actually touch on it. Yet you go look at Haiti, or Chili or other places. What was the predominant form of exchange during their initial disaster periods? It sure as heck wasn't paper money, that's for sure.
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