CRH

This stands for coin roll hunting. Collectors will go to the bank and ask for rolls or even entire boxes of coins. The goal of the hunter is search through each roll to find value or variety in the coins. In some cases, collectors will search the rolls to fill up coin albums. Finding each date of a coin series is fun and is a great and inexpensive way to introduce youngsters into the hobby.

I went to the local branch and asked for some rolls of pennies. The official term among serious collectors of pennies is cents. The coin actually says one cent on the reverse (tails) side of the coin. Penny is the old English term for the denomination. However, the penny is the more popular and accepted way to ask for these at the bank.

I'll look for a few different things in a the rolls. First, are there any wheat cents?  These are distinguished by the wheat stalks on the reverse of the coins and were minted prior to 1959.  Collecting "wheaties" is still popular, although these are not very common in everyday change. 

Secondly, I'll search for the special Lincoln cents from 2009 which have different images on the reverse. Lastly are there any pre-1982 cents?   I will pull those aside. Depending on the price of copper, these can be worth up to 2 cents each. It is against the law to melt copper pennies for their metal value, but it's a common practice among the CRH clan to get a percentage of how many copper cents an be found in random coin rolls.

The occasional Canadian penny and even dime will sneak into a roll, which I will also add to my keep pile. 

There are 2 types of rolls from the bank. Bank rolled coins are coins wrapped by a machine and will be tight with a crimped edge. Customer wrapped rolls will be loose and are wrapped by hand. The rolls I got from the bank this time were customer wrapped.

So lets take a look and see what I found:

I opened the rolls and most of the pile I found were not anything special.  However, I did find:

                                                           42      coppers
                                                           one    2007 Euro 2 cent coin from Spain
                                                           one    1955 Wheat cent
                                                           one    1979 Canadian cent
                                                           two    2009 Lincoln log cabin cents

That was a lot of variety in just 5 rolls!

 

Obviously, this a fraction of an extremely tiny percentage of coins that are in circulation, but for purposes of this blog, I just wanted to the reader an idea of what CRH was all about.