Sprecher Ravin' Red Cranberry-Cherry

Franklin Mercer realized how much he had put his family through for the past couple of months. Whatever made him think that he was cut out to be an Olympic athlete is beyond me. Now that his dreams were behind him he decided to take Sharon and the kids on a camping expedition in Wisconsin.

They got a nice little lakeside cabin and everything was calm and relaxing. It was the most perfect vacation any of them had ever been apart of. When hiking the first night they discovered a cherry orchard and a cranberry swamp. What cranberries were doing growing in Wisconsin Franklin had no idea, but it was a nice discovery. On the third day Sharon decided to take the kids out to pick some fruit. They were filling their baskets and bindles full of juicy fruit (not the gum) when the trouble began. Dozens of cardinals came out of nowhere and started attacking the children, pecking at their tiny hands and faces. The family dropped everything and ran the mile back to their cabin, where they filled in Franklin on what had happened.

Franklin was infuriated and stormed out the door, grabbing his butterfly net off the porch. He made his way out to the orchard and hid until he saw a bird. He caught they cardinal in his net and was getting prepared to bash its skull in (Have I mentioned that Franklin has anger management problems?) when he realized that it wasn't an actual bird but rather it was animatronic. Suddenly he fell out of his hiding space in the tree. When he looked up there were two men standing above him. They helped him up, brushed him of and took him to the other side of the swamp where they had a small brewery. They were the Sprecher brothers, and they explained to him that they had grown the fruit in such a strange location in order to produce their new soda "Ravin' Red." They gave him a bottle to try, apologizing for their robot bird attack on his family. They had built them to keep away other animals, never expecting humans to stumble upon their orchard. Franklin accepted their apologies and cracked open the soda. His first thought when he took a sip was how full bodied it was. It had mostly a very sweet cranberry flavor, but some cherry was poking it's nose through. The brothers said the full bodiedness was due to the fact that it was fire brewed. That made sense so Franklin continued to drink. The more he drank the more he noticed a problem. The flavor didn't really fade away into an after taste after he swallowed. The more he drank the more intense the flavor got. BY the time he was 3/4 of the way done with the bottle it almost tasted like he was drinking a concentrate without the consistency. He finished off the bottle, told the brothers thank you for the soda, but you may want to work on it a little more and then walked home. Of course he did steal their butterfly net off of the porch as he had landed on his breaking it earlier in the story.