Owner Comments:
The first case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), Mad Cow Disease, was found in an agricultural lab in England in November 1986. The disease leads to / is associated with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans who consume infected meat. Millions of cattle were culled to stop the epidemic in the UK, which ended around 1998. My wife lived in England for a time in the early 1990s and, because she lived in the UK at that time, to this day, she is not allowed to donate blood in the United States.
75% Copper, 25% Nickel (Cupronickel) over a pure copper center / core
Mintage: 682,649,693
2.27 grams
17.9 mm diameter
Designer: John R. Sinnock
Torch, Olive Branch and Oak Branch (1964-Date)
I no longer have access to information on exactly when this coin was purchased or how. But it wasn’t one of the coins we sent in to get graded ourselves. Choya might have the information - he has long kept the records of such things in spreadsheets on his computer that may or may not have been destroyed or lost through the years. It was probably bought through eBay though and it was added before the set won the Best in Category award in 2008 - so we replaced the coin we had graded with a better one pretty much immediately.
We actually upgraded / replaced 5 of the 9 coins submitted to NGC in that submission with better coins before we won the Best in Category in 2008, within months of sending them in, because the coins we sent in just graded out so poorly and we were able to go get better grades for cheap so easily. And then we didn’t upgrade or change the set again for 10 years, when we bought 2 upgrades for the set in November 2018.
That submission of those coins for these mint sets was all the proof I needed at the time that I didn’t need to be submitting coins myself until I learned more, and I didn’t submit coins to NGC again for about 10 or 12 years after that disaster.