Caltrops - Beer, Curry and Vomit





	[quote name="Chairman Mao"][quote name="Fullofkittens"]But then when I (dons hipstery glasses and a sportcoat with leather elbows) <i>took a microbrewing class over at our local microbrewery</i> (checks Twitter on iPhone), they had great things to say about Sam Adams as a company. Apparently when all the big US megabrewers were bought out by foreign interests, the foreign companies tried to force out all the local competition by buying up all the... hops? Malt? Some crucial ingredient. For a couple of months there was nothing that microbrewers could do to get all the ingredients they needed to keep going. Sam Adams responded by using their size to buy up a huge stockpile of the stuff, and now they sell it to all the microbrewers at cost. [/quote] The 2007-2008 Hop shortage. There was bad weather in Europe, rising fuel costs and in the US, dramatically declining acreage that combined to make hops extremely scarce and expensive. I could only brew a handful of times in 2008, and I was paying $10 or more an ounce for hops. Sam Adams opened its hop stockpiles to homebrew stores and more importantly to micro-breweries and brewpubs to keep them afloat. In the US, they recultivated 200,000 acres for hop production, but hop vines take three years to mature. Another bit of fallout from the insane corn ethanol fad. The transportation costs also impacted malts taking the cost of the average 5 gallon homebrew batch from $35 to about $75. [/quote]