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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.""
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.
Forget the beer price...think of the cows! No more 'brewing by-products.' That's gotta be a whole lot better than what the replacement will be.
Guess you have not been to Canada in the past 20 years.
Swans
Spinnakers
Canoe Club
Philips Beer
Vancouver Island Brewing
Moon Under Water
Lighthouse Brewing
Hoyne Brewing
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.
Reading this on ethanol made me lose any hope in the government being anything but Oligarchy run:
http://www.mossmotors.com/Site...
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.
Don't drink it cold. Only tasteless pisswater is meant to be served cold. Beer with flavor is served at room temperature so you can taste it. When you chill beer you mute its flavors. Sure, cold beer may be more "refreshing" than room temperature beer, but if your drinking it to be "refreshed" you don't care what it tastes like anyway.
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
I am not against regulations as I see them as protection but bad regulation is just stupid.
Data? Facts? What is your analysis of the feed proposals?
Oh. you're just another Right wing Anti-science nut.
OK. next?
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.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
On top of that, they're taking comments until 2015 and didn't even realise this would be such a big deal, so in all likelihood the exemption will get preserved. (Particularly since congresspeople are now speaking out about it.) It's practically accidental.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.