Beer Price Crisis On the Horizon 397
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "The aficionados of beer and distilled spirits could be in for a major price-shock, if proposals by the Food and Drug Administration come to pass. Currently, breweries are allowed to sell unprocessed brewing by-products to feed farm animals. Farmers prize the nutritious, low-cost feed. But, new rules proposed by the FDA could force brewers to implement costly processing facilities or dump the by-products as waste. As one brewer put it, "Beer prices would go up for everybody to cover the cost of the equipment and installation.""
Follow the money (Score:5, Interesting)
We should try to follow the money more when such rules are implemented.
Who benefits the most from this? Big, big breweries who feel probably threatened by people who brew good beer (as a Dutch colleague of me said, they make Heineken by pumping the Maas water into the bottles).
This is a US problem. What company bought (more or less recently) a US brewery? Those Brasilian pump-and-dumpers do not know anything about beer, only about making money by selling something that resembles beer and manipulating the stock market, and since it is rather easy in the US to bribe officials, this really looks a move from their side.
We are not here to decide if we are paranoid, but to decide if we are paranoid enough.
What about the animals? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't worry Americans... (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess you have not been to Canada in the past 20 years.
Swans [swanshotel.com]
Spinnakers [spinnakers.com]
Canoe Club [canoebrewpub.com]
Philips Beer [phillipsbeer.com]
Vancouver Island Brewing [vanislandbrewery.com]
Moon Under Water [moonunderwater.ca]
Lighthouse Brewing [lighthousebrewing.com]
Hoyne Brewing [hoynebrewing.ca]
That is just in Victoria BC a small city of 300k. There are many more across Canada. By the way the craft brewing trend started in Canada and spread to the US. American craft beers have improved over the last ten years as have Canadian craft beers. Lets not get into a pissing match. That could be a long battle with all the beer involved.
Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading this on ethanol made me lose any hope in the government being anything but Oligarchy run:
http://www.mossmotors.com/Site... [mossmotors.com]
AFAIK, putting 10% ethanol in gas drops the mpg of cars more than 10%. At least according to a Consumer Reports article I read years ago and they went by rule experience. Basically it means that if they took all the ethanol out of the gas, and gave you 0.9 gallons pure gas instead of 1 gallon adulterated, you as a driver would be better off.
So the entire industry is completely taxpayer supported bullshit. We're carrying an industry that has no use. And this in an era where water table is decreasing (corn is unbelievably thirsty), food prices and meat rising astronomically, etc.
I have friends in the corn states. The corn farmers (and usually farm corps) are well off... at the expense of everyone else.
And there are hundreds of other examples like that. For every 1 good thing the government does, it seems there are 4-5 examples of overreach which costs everyone and only benefits a small segment.
Re:Don't worry Americans... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Brewers get $30 a ton for the waste from beer manufacturing.
The lost revenue is not the issue. The breweries could just put it in a landfill and the beer prices would hardly be effected. The costs would come in the equipment and manpower needed to comply with the new regulations. Letting perfectly good animal feed go to waste because a bad regulation is prohibiting the sale is a bad idea.
They just have to follow the same rules as everybody else who sells animal feed, like Purina Chows and Cargill.
Every farmer who sells hay does not have to package that hay in closed sanitized containers. There are different regulations for different kinds of feed. Another issue is that the transport is very different. Most large feed manufacturers have large plants that ship feed over a wide area. This feed can sit around for weeks or months before it is used. In that time there is a very good probability that any small contamination could grow into something serious. Spent grain is sanitized during manufacture, shipped extremely short distances and used within a few days of production. There is very little possibility of contamination in that time. Comparing spent grain from small breweries to Cargill is like comparing a weekend bake sale to Mr. Christie [snackworks.ca]
I am not against regulations as I see them as protection but bad regulation is just stupid.
Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score:2, Interesting)
Data? Facts? What is your analysis of the feed proposals?
Oh. you're just another Right wing Anti-science nut.
OK. next?
Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score:1, Interesting)
Either way, head lines such as "Beer prices could go up" is not the way to debate this :)
Nonsense. Consequences are important in any discussion of this nature.
Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would much rather have a bad law that requires an effort to keep in place than a bad law that requires an effort to repeal.
Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So I was all "Social contract, move to Somalia" (Score:1, Interesting)
It's perfectly OK to be against homosexual marriage. It's a right to oppose. Why is it imperative we have allow diversity with all manner of things such as color, creed, being a homosexual, but not with dissenting opinions. Everyone has a right to an opinion and a vote, even if it goes wildly against popular opinion. Voltaire mentioned something similar if you recall...
Society will always have dissenters from popular views. That's OK and should be welcomed, even if those views radically differ and even anger you. I believe homosexuals have the right to do whatever they want under the law, but I will not assist them with normalizing their unnatural behaviors. I'm old enough to remember when one couldn't find a homosexual person easily. They must be putting something in the water, because when I was in junior high and high school, I cannot recall even suspecting someone of being a homosexual, and I attended multiple schools around the world due to my father working for the government. Even in Europe, I never recall seeing more than a couple in many years.
Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you live in an area of where temperatures drop a fair bit below freezing for a fair chunk of the year, you would end up adding ethanol as a fuel anti-freeze. It is also a weak solvent for compounds that are not soluble in gasoline, absorbs moisture, reduces the likelihood of engine knocking and a handful of other benefits.
Ethanol does have lower energy density than gasoline but it has enough benefits for some amount of it still being generally desirable - if you removed all ethanol from gasoline, gas companies would likely replace it with a more complex additive cocktail that might not perform quite as good.
Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score:2, Interesting)
>So the entire industry is completely taxpayer supported bullshit. We're carrying an industry that has no use. And this in an era where water table is decreasing (corn is unbelievably thirsty), food prices and meat rising astronomically, etc.
Yes. Scientists and economists have known that corn ethanol is complete bullshit for a very long time now.
If you're interested in a good analysis of the subject, read the Economics of Food by Westhoff, which is mainly about the effects of biofuels on food prices. While ethanol is only a small fraction of demand for corn, due to the way the markets worked, it drive huge spikes in corn prices, which had downstream effects on corn mash (which the OP is referring to here), it altered the balance between white and yellow corn which caused food exports to Mexico to drop, leading to massive price spikes in tortillas there, leading to riots, various issues with trade protectionism, and so forth.
Given that there's absolutely no reason to use corn ethanol, the only reason that we still have it (and both major parties support it) is because corn farmers get first crack at choosing who our next president is.
If they implement feeding restrictions on corn mash, this will have very serious consequences on our food supply and will send price shocks throughout the world. It's a very bad idea.