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Beer Price Crisis On the Horizon
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.""
I like my government to help make sure things are safe for eating and drinking.
And I especially like when the government responds to criticisms by saying they didn't understand this issue when they made their rules and will take comments from the industry and revise their proposed rules as they have done in this case.
I know it is not as fun for the anti-government types, but even the linked to article mentions it at the very bottom of the story:
The FDA will open up the rule to comments again this summer and then revise the proposal, which is due to be finalized by August, 2015.
So this is already a non issue, they have agreed to revise the rules so there are not the dire consequences the article was using to stir everyone up.
Wax on, wax off baby!
OMFG. You frigging yankees can't even RTFA.
"OMG! ZOMG! gov't taking our freedoms!!! this must stop now!!!!!"
Let me help those of you who are not yet blind with rage, by quoting the RTFA:
The spent grain is hauled to dairy farms in the area, giving local cows a high-protein, high-fiber feed.
The proposal would classify companies that distribute spent grain to farms as animal feed manufacturers, possibly forcing them to dry and package the material before distribution.
It's not targeted on breweries specifically. It is targeted at diary farms. It is about accountability what the cows are fed with. Breweries inserted themselves into the market and, as suppliers, are subject to regulations.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
This is all a tempest in a teapot. The FDA is proposing rules for complying with a 2011 law passed by congress to ensure food safety. Brewers had been exempt from the rule because they were able to buy off congresscritters in the past. Now they will have to keep records and conduct training to make sure that they aren't shipping contaminated waste grain to feed cows. People who love to eat cows should welcome the fact that they can be assured that their cows haven't been fed contaminated feed.
All of the hysteria about driving brewers out of business is just hyperbole. Before these rules, brewers could ship contaminated, spoiled grain to feed cows without any accountability. Now they will be accountable to make sure that they don't feed cows garbage... seems reasonable.
You can read the FDA regulation (and avoid the hysterical hype) here:
http://www.fda.gov/Food/Guidan...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
What contamination? The grain is heated to 170F long enough to kill anything harmful in it. There has never been a case of this causing a single problem anywhere. Even the FDA admits it doesn't know of any incident that would have been prevented by this proposal. It's like mandatory testing for antimatter contamination in coffee. It never happens.
Perhaps the FDA should focus it's resources on things that have been a problem like fungal contamination in drugs.
Complete clickbait.
If timothy had actually RTFA that he cited then he would see that this won't affect the price of beer much at all:
Many brewers give the grain away to get rid of it while others sell it to brokers at a low price. Widmer, for example, sells it for $30 a ton. “This is not a large revenue stream for us,” Mennen said.
That works out to losing $30 in revenue per 2000 gallons of beer. It would, however, increase the price farmers pay for feed.
Yup. According to the article, brewers would lose up to one cent in revenue per sixpack ($30 per ton of spent grain) if this rule went through.
since brewing waste was added to pig feed a few years ago, an unprecedented problem has emerged at hog farms around the country -- explosive manure foam. several barns have exploded, in one instance killing hundreds of pigs. more commonly, the noxious foam seeps up from the shitheap underneath the barn, through the slats in the floor, and into the pens. this widespread, extant problem is being addressed by these new regulations.
link to click http://www.motherjones.com/tom...
> By your reasoning, we had been using asbestos for 4500 years, so surely if there was something inherently unsafe about it, we would have known about it 4400 years ago.
Asbestos was a curiosity until about 1900, when it started to be used a lot. Pliny wrote about the dangers of it 1800 years earlier, in 80 AD. Other people probably knew about the danger earlier, but Pliny's writings are the oldest we still have available for reading on the subject.