From the dept. of things you might (or might not) want going down yr neck:
I'm not (y'all might have noticed) not from Texas and so hadn't ever heard of it but apparently there was a small Dr. Pepper plant there that was still bottling Dr. Pepper made with sugar. It was known as Dublin Dr. Pepper (cos it was made in Dublin, TX). And now it's closing. I think it's mostly a story of big company bringing the hammer down with no concern for the amount of harm done to a small community where a whole bunch of jobs are about to disappear. Altho from reading a bit online, it seems like there's maybe a side-bar story of a bit of over-reach -- maybe not much in the grand scheme and completely understandable (if you've got something that becomes a hot commodity/trendy product, you want to seize the chance to move more units, even if there's an agreement in place restricting where you can sell and you have to get a little grey market) but enough to give the big money boys an excuse to drop the aforementioned hammer.
So I've been hearing these really obnoxious ads on the radio for Dr. Pepper 10 (and when I say "hearing" I mean the first few seconds before I change the station). And I've read a lot of internet scorn about the DP10 campaign, which is basically a loud, dumb "ooh, our diet soda isn't for the ladies but only for manly men like you." Srsly? I mean, do I even have to get into the myriad ways that's offensive and stupid? No, I didn't think so. And, besides, if I did, I'd be here all night writing. Anyway, apparently there are also TV ads cos one aired when we were watching 30 Rock on-demand (and thus no fast-forwarding). I was out of the room but Sarah confirmed that it is, in fact, incredibly stupid and offensive. So it's not just me, then. And, no, I'm not linking to that crap.
Let's wrap up on a much more positive note: earlier this week I went to Drinks with Fullsteam. Sadly, they were brewing in the back so we couldn't meet in the production area, which was the original plan. Still, it was super fun and interesting. Small group (15 or so folks, I think) and the guys from Fullsteam were there to talk about what they were doing and answer questions. I'm sure nothing they told us was confidential but I didn't take notes so I won't go into specifics cos I don't want to get anything wrong. But they talked about stuff like how they decide what kind of R&D projects to work on, how they scale up from test batches, what kind of things they're working on, the 300 mile project, issues with sourcing ingredients. One interesting thing discussed was how they can brew something exactly the same from one run to the next and yet have people say it tastes completely different, often in ways that contradict each other (oh, it was darker last year... no, it's darker this year). Not that I'd know anything about that...