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A CO2 Shortage is Causing a Beer and Meat Crisis in Britain (qz.com)
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is used in the production of a wide variety of food and drink products. But with at least five CO2 producers across northern Europe offline, a shortfall in the gas is causing shortages in beer, fizzy drinks, and meat. From a report: Britain is particularly affected because the seasonal shutdown of the plants has meant that the UK has only one big plant producing CO2 left. The British Beer and Pub Association, along with individual beer producers and pubs, has warned of the crisis caused by the shortage. Without naming companies, the trade association said the shortfall has caused beer production shortages. Heineken, the UK's biggest brewer, said its CO2 supplier was facing "a major issue" in the UK. Meanwhile, one of Britain's biggest pub chains, Wetherspoons, said it'll be forced to pull a number of beers and fizzy drinks from its menu soon.
oi m8 a tree nicked me foamie
If the entire Slashdot community can agree on *anything*, it should be that a shortage of meat and beer is indeed a crisis worthy of drastic government intervention.
#DeleteChrome
"If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?!"
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
but meat? wtf UK?
... of that highly touted Euro style âoeworkâ. Sure everyone thinks that like 5 weeks vacation is good until all the Euros take off for a month and then society shuts down.
Good job, Euros! Iâ(TM)ll enjoy my cold carbonated beer in the US.
*Leans back to watch the chaos and reaches to pop open a.....oh wait*
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
WTF does CO2 have to do with meat?
No wonder British "cooking" is at the bottom of any list of culinary delights...
little to no carbonation typically, also healthier if you believe the studies
They've been shrinking and increasing the price of our favourite drinks while other drinks get sweeteners put in which taste funny. The sugar demanding masses are fizzed off and they are letting things pop.
It's amazing how much fizz we put into our drinks, with all the plastic, metal and CO2 involved. The logistics are tightly controlled and just a few things can upset the balance and cause shortages.
When making beer at home, the fermentation produces CO2 and you get whatever amount of bubbly that the fermentation gives you.
When producing major national and international brands, I would think companies like Heineken have a very specific CO2 level for each brand, influenced by market research and other factors. I would expect they add or remove CO2 from each batch to consistently produce the same Heineken product every time.
You mom. I've been supplying her with my man-meat for that last 2 months.
weird bunch.
Seriously, this seems like an easy problem to solve. We have too much in one place and not enough in another place.
Can't we just extract it from the air and bottle it for the people who need it?
I thought that the UK was at the epicenter of the movement for real ale, which doesn't need any extraneous CO2.
Beers don't need CO2, it is produced during the fermentation... unless you call your self a brewmaster but you are in fact a chemist.
I've got to wonder why the government didn't act sooner? Is this just being blown out of proportion or is Britain's government breaking down in the wake of Brexit? I mean, if you put people who don't trust government in charge of government you've gotta kind of expect these sorts of things...
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That's like standing an the beach and complaining about water shortages. Idiots all!
What is the impact on global warming? /s
No carbon dioxide? Let them use nitrogen!
I'm guessing the flow of Guiness is unaffected as they use nitrogen instead of CO2 in their taps.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If the companies start sucking CO2 out of the air, we can solve 3 major problems in one go; global warming being a distant 3rd to beer and euthanizing cows, of course. Go team!
They're not even an ok brewer.
Cut down more of those pesky CO2 sucking trees. That ought to solve the problem.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Sure, except, of course, that the beer goes flat fast if you gravity feed it from a keg.
Shut up, you illiterate jackass.
that there's suffering from a shortage of CO2 for our comfort foods and yet we are potentially destroying our planet with an oversupply of that exact same CO2 (unfiltered of course) and a couple of others.
Surely we should be putting some scavenging satellites into low orbit to suck up all this free CO2, Methane and Nitrous Oxide and firing it back down to earth in canisters or better yet make the beer in orbit add CO2 and Nitrous Oxide send that down instead and market it as Orbit or Reentry or Touchdown or something :P
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
The atmosphere is loaded with CO2.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-canadian-start-up-is-removing-co2-from-the-air-and-turning-it-into-pellets
Man the barricades! Break out the muskets! All hands on deck!!!
Environmentalists say we have produce TOO MUCH Carbon Dioxide and causing the glaciers to melt while beer producers say we are suffering a SHORTAGE of Carbon Dioxide. We should introduce the two sides to each other and work out the problem. Environmentalists can share some of their excess CO2 with the beer people.
When I made beer, the yeast made all the CO2 necessary.
Since I don't eat meat or drink fizzy drinks, this would not be a problem for me. Probably would be healthier for most people to give up meat (heart disease, cancer) and fizzy drinks (diabetes, heart disease).
OTOH, Beer would be a problem. We all need beer for good health.
(Maybe we could prioritize beer over meat and fizzy drinks with a "national CO2 rationing board".)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
But if this is gonna make it hard to get my beloved Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout, then I'm gonna get perturbed.
#DeleteChrome
I had the wonderful experience of spending a little time with Koko. She took me by the hand for a walk, read The Three Little Kittens to me and signed “Mama Angry”. I made some flashcards for her to learn some new words (she had a vocabulary of 2000 words and understood a lot of English).
She was able to even create words. She saw a duck and signed “water bird”. She listened to some classical music piece which was sad and signed “cry”.
I am sad and will miss her.
I thought we were in a crisis because of too much CO2. Now there's a shortage?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
If only the UK had unrestricted trade with the nearby EU...
If you haven't, try cask drawn ales if you get a chance. These beers use the natural carbonation that is produced during the fermentation process and are hand drawn so the need for c02 to push the beer is unnecessary. Having very little carbonation brings out light and delicate flavors in the beer that are usually masked by having lots of C02. My favorite are cask drawn IPAs.
Sinister Brussels plan to make Britons sober up long enough to about Brexit.
Lie back there and drink warm, flat beer for England
Moo!
Make Homer something something.
I would guess this should affect draft beer in bars
Not real draft beers since these come from a cask, not a pressurized keg.
No worries.
CO2 is created by the yeast needed to create the beer-- why is there a C02 shortage?
Why the hell would there be a seasonal shutdown when there is year-round demand?
Then again, this is Britain we're talking about. Logic has long been hard to come by there.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
* UK has only one big plant producing CO2 left."
All the world tries to reduce the emission of CO2 and the Brits have a factory mass-producing it, ts-ts.
I keep getting told that with CO2 levels now at 400ppm is too much? How can there be a shortage when they can just extract it out of the air?
Make up your minds, morans! You're undermining your own arguments!
Why not use nitrogen instead?
That is what they get for buying into the global warming/CO2 is bad story. They need a machine that will suck CO2 from the air and put it into the bottles they use in the beer & meat industry.
Not those kind of knockers. The guys that used to club the cattle for slaughtering.
User replied to an empty comment to get unburiable status. That's pathetic.
-H.B.
Uuum, if it came out that they would add CO2 afterwards, around here, they would destroy the brewer in the press and they would be like taintes with the plague! You couls not even hold such a beer in your hand among peope, and not be scolded. Every respectable shop would stop selling it. The would backpedal like crazy the very next day.
Definitely for Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Be/Ne/Lux, Poland, Czechia, and ver likely for every country surrounding them.
OK, so only to get 'slightly' political, with the exception of a huge burden of taxes or regulation, why isn't plain vanilla Capitalism 101 fixing this issue?
Only those who subscribe to the taint ethos.
These are the people who can't get over Mars mission urine purification systems with engineered osmotic membranes, while they drink tap water that (somewhere in history) a trillion fish have pissed into (or worse).
These are also the same people who regard bleach as Oil of Witch Doctor. Bleach doesn't remove taint, whereas Oil of Witch sure does.
They should probably team up with someone like these guys. We get our meat and beer back and the planet stops warming up so fast.
Everyone wins.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
There's lots in the atmosphere, too much in fact. Go go go.
A number of decades ago, an oil & gas exploration well was drilled in South Australia (where that big Tesla battery is) and the only gas that came out of it was virtually pure CO2.
It's still coming out decades later, but the well has been capped for years and the gas is cleaned then used for industrial purposes like those mentioned in the article. Much cheaper than sourcing it from natural gas which is the current main source of it as a byproduct of Hydrogen production for the manufacturing of ammonia.
Just a note. Beer does not need any CO2. Everything that needs added CO2, is not to be called a Beer, it's some fizzy alcohol drink. ;)
Sorry, I gotta tell da Brits dat dey gotta make da beers da rite way. Dey gotta foiment da beers unda presha. Dat way, da CO2 gonna stay widin da beers an not escape. Gottit?
They will get a taste what happens when Brexit is done and they are out of far more stuff than just CO2.
Surely we can all revert to only drinking cask conditioned ales. In addition bring back the Autovac! Whenever I visit Yorkshire for the Autumn shoot I am delighted that most pubs have hand pulls with Autovacs installed and actually know how to use them properly to improve the beers taste and give it a tight head.
Most keg lagers in the UK that require CO2 taste like water in comparison to most cask ales.
British government announces emergency polluters to be activated.
CO2, CO2 everywhere but none to fizz your beer...
I panicked at the headline but real beer and good meat would not make use of extra CO2 anyway.
Clean coal! (and lime kilns, and ammonia production plants)
Maybe they'll go to the polls sober and start unfucking their country.
How can the beer industry be short on CO2? Doesn't the fermentation process produce CO2 in the first place?