90 Years of Cheerwine Celebration »
2007 marks the 90th anniversary of Cheerwine - the Cherry Different Soft Drink, and with it, the company hosted a 90 Years of Cheer celebration in downtown Salisbury. The public was invited to the event, which included a display of memorabilia from years past, as well as a number of recipes featuring Cheerwine.
Unfortunately, it seemed that they weren't quite ready for the flow of people who either really like Cheerwine, or just saw that something was happening and stopped in to see what was going on. So a few minutes before showtime, the gathering started to swell beyond the organizer's meager attempts to contain it, and the food wasn't quite ready for the people to partake. Specifically, the popcorn machine couldn't keep up, and the Cheerwine slush-making machines never really did get very slushy. It was more like "mostly cold" Cheerwine. Still, it was free, so you can't complain much.
The good news is that once people started streaming in, the larger section was cordoned off, and that gave the slush machine a chance to catch up, so everyone milled about outside to listen to a band play, eat some hot dogs and hamburgers from Hap's Grill and play some carnival-like games that had been set up.
Once everything was caught up inside, they opened back up, and one of the slush machines was ready-to-go, as was the popcorn. Someone decided to take a bite out of the cake, even though it wasn't quite time for the cake-cutting festivities as of yet, and the Cheerwine ice cream machine started to crank up. We stayed to get a bite of that, but were a bit surprised that the ice cream was really just like black cherry - there didn't seem to be any soft drink taste to it at all (this isn't really bad, as I really like black cherry ice cream, it was just unexpected).
After a while, we saw all that we needed to see, and took off before the actual cake cutting happened. We couldn't actually say if the Cheerwine cake was any good, as we weren't the ones who cut the cake and took a bite before we were supposed to do so - but perhaps that person, or someone who stuck around until they did cut he cake would be able to chime in to say if it was any good. Still, nothing like a (mostly) free event (the hot dogs and burgers were cheap, but not free) for an entertaining Saturday afternoon!
