Root Beer Factory
Yes, that is what we are becoming. My back is sore from bottling.. lets see… 365 cases of soda pop. Multiply that by 24 bottles in case, and I single handedly took 8760 bottles of root beer and cream soda of the bottling line today. WOW. It looks like this year we may actually produce more root beer than beer. We don’t even market it, it just sort of grows on its own. When I first started working here, I think we only produced about 500 barrels of root beer. This year we should break 1000 barrels. It provides a steady income for us.
However I do not want this place to become a root beer factory. Yes that is something that is said around here when we have trouble making beer, in a sarcastic fashion. Root beer is easy to make, but it has a very thin profit margin. Real sugar is incredibly expensive, and it is what makes our root beer so very good. But it makes our margin so small, that there is no real hope of selling our root beer outside the state, as the margin left to a distributor is not particularly pleasing. Especially so with the huge margins that are made of corn syrup derived soda’s. Yes it really does cost only penny’s to make the Coke or Pepsi in a twelve pack that you pay 5$ for. More importantly, Root beer does not earn us enough money to pay for the expansion of equipment that will be required to keep expanding our output of it. Making that much more beer however, would really put us in the money!
So we keep making it, but we do not spend any advertising money on it. Plus, I didn’t go to pop school. There is no mystery in making root beer, and it really does not hold my attention. I’m not in this for the money, although getting paid is nice, i’m in it for the fun of creating good beer. It so happens that making good beer is extremely challenging, and that is what I like. So i’ll leave it to the Jones and Sobe of the world (who are all owned by huge companies now, Pespi owns Sobe) to make pop.