We have bad news, and when we say bad we mean BAD! Think about how terrible rising gas prices are… now think about the pending food crisis that will soon be upon us… and now times your anger and frustration from thinking about those things tenfold because the news we have to break to you is far more serious than both of these things combined. There is a worldwide hops shortage, and incase you aren’t aware hops are a key ingredient in the beer making process.
We don’t know about you guys but we are pretty protective when it comes to our beer. We have no problem shelling out for gas because without gas how are we going to get to our jobs to make money so we can buy beer. We aren’t worried about a food crisis because it’s just silly things like rice and corn being mentioned right now and neither of those things are found in the food we eat with beer like pizza and chicken wings. However, we do take issue with the possibility of breweries not being able to put out enough product and the inevitable rise in beer prices that has already taken effect in some areas.
Cases of beer have already started to rise in price by 2 to 3 dollars in some parts of North America and as the shortage gets more serious prices will continue to rise. The shortage is being caused by droughts across Europe which supplies the world with most of its hops. If any of you happen to be in or going to Europe learn how to do a rain dance and maybe we can get the hops farmers some precipitation before prices get out of control. You may look stupid but this is the kind of crisis where people need to come together for a greater good.
There are a couple of other things that can be done to minimize the effects felt during this shortage. First of all, anything that isn’t beer and uses hops should not be produced until there is a healthy hops supply. For instance there are all sorts of herbal medicines that use hops as an ingredient and people could do without them for a while. Everyone knows herbal medicines don’t really work anyways so it shouldn’t be hard to cut of their hops supply. Also, there is some drink called Julmust in Sweden that is a soft drink with hops in it that nobody really needs. A product like that should have never even existed, it sounds disgusting!
Another solution would be that some breweries, that will remain unnamed, could stop brewing shitty lime, Clamato, what have you infused beers. There is really no need for these brews, if some guy really wants a lime in his beer he can tuck his junk in between his legs and have a Corona. We don’t mind the small microbreweries messing with flavors because they have to make a unique product to get noticed but the major players in the beer game need to stick to their roots and stop wasting precious hops on crap in a bottle.
It’s too early to tell how serious this hop shortage will get, but if it comes down to it we’re ready to launch an online campaign and petition to force any non essential hops product or beers to stop production. If the hops shortage got serious that there was a beer shortage and there were limits on how much you could drink or purchase, what would you do? Would you go all “Grapes of Wrath” and go looking for greener pastures or would you just cut back drinking? We’re not sure what we would do but it would probably be extreme because a world without beer is not one that we’re interested in.
