Fresh Root Beer

I was intending to trot out with another informative (read: boring) discourse on the realities of cellaring real ale, when I passed A & W in Oakridge on the way down to Eugene for a quick shopping run. I was hopeful that this time the shopping run might entail a visit to a purveyor, or plural, of fine barley-oriented beverages. This would purely be, of course, as a reward of my bravery in attempting to shop sensibly. Success has been achieved, thanks to my vehicle's tendency to navigate to McMenamins High Street Cafe while in Eugene. That's my wife's vehicle, actually, as mine has no brake lights, amongst other electrical features, due to mice and their industrious incisors.

Now, as many of you know, A & W is a pioneer in the manufacturing, promotion and retail of the acclaimed soft drink known as root beer. They have a multiplicity of franchises all over this fair land. I used to take my wee little daughters into our local (for lack of a better word) for a root beer float or two before they learned how to roll their eyes at me and say "Dad!" in that tell-tale, teenage accent. It is firmly etched in their gray matter. I hope.

So, all that blather above just to introduce the bit that caught my eye. The reader board, located as such to catch the travelers' eye, said "Root Beer, Made Fresh Daily". I didn't happen to notice a surfeit of Les Schwab tire skid marks opposite the "restaurant" in prospective patrons' efforts to toss back a fresh one, but the promotion is in its early stages and I admonish myself to be patient. But the rub here: am I to understand this bold, all-caps advertising strategy as suggesting that BOTH the fizzy soda water AND the root-beer-syrup-food-product are, as the precursors, suitably "fresh"? What exactly is "fresh root beer"? Are the CO2 bubbles in the peak of their hazardous existence?

Now beer, particularly real ale, cannot be made fresh daily. It can be made daily to be fresh at least two weeks out, but you wouldn't be interested in it the day it is brewed; at least not in the sense of one tipping back a pint of same. We do like to take a little sample as it tumbles into the fermenter after the heat exchanger, but mostly to see if it might be headed for the land of just plain awful or the magnificent realm of the sublime.

And I want you all to check back every hour or two to hear my further tales of the woes of beer finings, and I hope someone questions my over-use of quotation marks.