A Friday (i.e., beer) post

Why price increases are brewing for craft beers:

That six pack of high-brow beer is about to come at a higher price, thanks to the sharpest surge in decades in the cost of the hops and barley that give each brew its distinctive taste.

Consumers could pay 50 cents to $1 per six pack more in the coming months for many small-batch "craft beers," as brewers pass on rising hops and barley costs from an unpalatable brew of poor harvests, the weak dollar and farmers' shift to more profitable crops. Other makers of craft beers, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. brewing industry, say they may eat the higher ingredient costs, which will pare their profits.

And here is the environmental economics hook:

Prices for malting barley, which accounts for a beer's color and sweetness, have jumped as farmers increasingly shifted to planting corn, which has been bringing higher prices because of high demand from makers of biofuels, like ethanol.

Comments

[anonymous]

Maybe they should add more corn syrup, and use less barley ... no wait, corn syrup is going up, and the beer would taste like Coors ... never mind.

[Blurm]

stop stupid wasteful corn subsidies and work toward a real fuel for the future that isn't a waste of time and money like ethanol...

[Blurm]

stop stupid wasteful corn subsidies and work toward a real fuel for the future that isn't a waste of time and money like ethanol...

[coda]

the solution for me is very simple. microbrews produce a bottle of beer for less than they sell it for, the ethanol industry produces a gallon of fuel for more than the market will bear. its a loser, lets stop acting like ethanol is anything more than political subsidy, pandering to the US farming regions that are woefully unprepared and/or unwilling to change for new economic realities.

[David Stearns]

There has never been a more compelling reason to end ethanol subsidies. To distort the market so that one, clearly less sublime, form of ethanol is being produced in the stead of Craft Beer, one of the pinnacles of human achievement, is completely unacceptable! And like the other posts have already pointed out, ethanol is not a viable fuel; even if we converted all of the US' corn production to ethanol, it would cover only a fraction of our transportation fuel needs. And that's if we forwent all other uses of corn!

[anonymous]

Ethanol is one step toward separating us from oil dependancy. It's not the perfect solution, and it's not the only solution. It is part of the learning process. We need government subsidies to help lower the barriers to entry. We don't need to continue the subsidies very long.