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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.""
No, really... this is getting nuts.
I get the whole general protection of the average citizen from crimes, but we really need to shrink the reach and scope of these bastards.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You can count on us Canadians to provide you with quality beer that isn't watered down and has actual kick to it! Though you will have to occasionally deal with Molson, and perhaps some weird off-brands, or something oddly flavored for the trendy folks at the centre-of-the-univerise(Toronto).
Om, nomnomnom...
Wouldn't eliminating a source of cheap feed also increase milk and beef prices?
So, not feeding the beer by-products to cows will acidify the oceans???
Who knew?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Better living through regulation strikes again. It is part of a well oiled machine.
Obama: My Plan Makes Electricity Rates Skyrocket
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Brewers get $30 a ton for the waste from beer manufacturing. Per can/bottle of beer, that's negligible.
Brewers can continue to sell this as animal feed. They just have to follow the same rules as everybody else who sells animal feed, like Purina Chows and Cargill. The big plants will have to do a little more processing and testing. The "craft brewers" don't produce that much waste, and it's biodegradable.
OK, so tell me where in the Constitution I should look for Federal power to regulate beer that doesn't cross state lines.
Seastead this.
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.
I love to know exactly what kind of pathogen they're envisioning - something that infects the mash (which admittedly is a rich culture, and if it starts out sterile it's not going to stay that way for long) and then infects the cows in a way that will be a problem for humans. E. coli is already in the cows (hence the regulations concerning the use of fresh manure on crops likely to be eaten raw) and cows will do a lot of their own processing. Milk products are generally pasteurized anyway. Somehow I'm not exactly seeing a spent grain prion vector...
I'm doubting this will go through. Now, if they're really worried, funding a small study to look at whether it's a likely vector might make sense.
(Not that I'd be sad to see more spent-grain bread. Tasty, that.)
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.
That's the reason for political correctness: to expand the scope of government past immediate risks to ideological risks. It's a power grab.
The correct way to deal with this is not to be anti-politically correct, but to stop being politically correct. That deprives government of its justification for its new powers.
Futurist Traditionalism
I once worked at a place where we produced a lot of waste contaminated lubricant. We securely set this barrels, and a nice guy would come by and pump it out and reprocess it and sell for whatever it could be used for.
Ron Jeremy?
Recent CNN report on the prices of beef and dairy: http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/1...
This will increase the cost to farmers too. That gets passed on to consumers. But perhaps we're all just commenting on the obvious: Production cost of X increases. The production cost of any product Y directly (or transitively) dependent upon X will also increase (or the value/quality of Y may decrease to compensate).
And how many people will consider beer waste handling as an important enough issue to vote out someone? None. They're going to be more interested in big ticket items like gay rights or abortion. This is how the government stealthes in an array of regulations that eventually consume our every moment.
-- Will program for bandwidth
except for it isnt the republicans who are pushing this..... I stand by your statement however if you replace republicans with the actual group who are pushing this
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
> 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.
If a someone burns a gallon of 90% gas, 10% ethanol, they've only burned 0.9 gallons of gas. Yay, less gas burned! That's the win.
However, people don't drive 1 gallon to work, they drive X miles to get to work. Since the blend has lower mpg, more of it is burned on the same trip. For easy math, let's look at a 33 mile trip, in a car that gets 33 mpg on gas. Using 100% gas, that trip will burn 1 gallon of gas. That's a key number:
33 mile trip = 1 gallon of pure gas
With the blend, the mpg will be about 10% lower, or 30 mpg. Therefore, it will take 1.1 gallons of blend to make the trip.
33 mile trip = 1.1 gallon of blend
Let's divide that blend into its components:
33 mile trip = 1 gallon of gas + 0.1 gallon of ethanol
So what have we saved. In the first instance, we burned one gallon of gas. In the second instance, we burned one gallon of gas, plus .1 gallon of ethanol. We've saved nothing. We have, however, increased the cost of food by wastefully burning corn that could have been eaten.
Go look at the Congressional voting by region for that Civil Rights Act.
It was FAR more an issue of North vs South than of Republican vs Democrat.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body