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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."
*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
Nope sorry, it is just poor planning.
L'Idiot
Modern slaughterhouses use CO2 for "controlled atmosphere stunning" to render the animals unconscious before slaughter.
They use CO2 in the packaging, because regular air has oxygen and would spoil it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
little to no carbonation typically, also healthier if you believe the studies
it's used as part of the packaging. Modified Atmosphere Packaging is a process where CO2 is pushed into the package removing all "air" before sealing. It stops nasty organisms growing in there.
it's common to see Nitrogen and CO2 as the gas. I don't know much more than the above, but I would imagine there is a wiki article to explain further. Oh, and i'm likely wrong about all of the above but the community will put me right
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
It's not just that, CO2 is used in the modified atmosphere packing of meat also. So meat that would have say 6 days life over wrapped may get 12 days gas flushed (with CO2 and N2)
If it means that I have to drink wine and eat fish or go vege for a month, it's no big tragedy. Free time >> Beer and meat.
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.
but meat? UK?
Have you ever had meat in the UK? They have strict rules about how livestock are fed and what medications/hormones can be given to animals destine for the meat packers. They forbid imports from countries (like the US) that don't follow the same rules, so beef is expensive and usually a lot more tough than what we get in the USA. Chicken and pork are similar. They have some good lamb though.
but alas, none of that has anything to do with the article.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Well, since the air we breathe is something like 85% nitrogen, why not just sub Nitrogen for CO2?
There's plenty of other inert gases they could use for that though? Nitrogen or Argon would work just as well, no?
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.
CO2 is used to stun animals before slaughter. It's more humane than just cutting straight to shooting a bolt into a cow's head to stun them.
But the reason for the cooking in the UK is more about their history and the expense involved in raising meat in the UK. They have some pretty strict feeding and medication regulations for slaughter animals. Where here in the USA, we administer antibiotics, growth hormones and have no issues with GMO corn, in the UK you cannot do any of that and sell the meat. So it's hard to import meat and feed and Britain isn't exactly a great place to raise cattle being cold and wet a lot of the time.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It amazes how they managed to brainwash young libertarians so that they will enjoy slavery.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
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?...
Because making nitrogen from air is a resource-consuming process. Un-mixing two gases reduces their entropy, and the Second Law says you can't do that without making more entropy elsewhere. There are ways; if you know anyone in poor respiratory health, you may have seen an oxygen concentrator that does just that (except it throws away the nitrogen instead of the oxygen).
But the object is to get a non-oxidizing gas, and CO2 works for that, often with a cheaper process.
Oh, and it's 78%.
Brexit hasn't happened yet, you know. The restrictions you cite are due to the EU, and since the whole EU enforces them meat can be imported from the EU without problems.
CO2 is used to stun animals before slaughter. It's more humane than just cutting straight to shooting a bolt into a cow's head to stun them.
But the reason for the cooking in the UK is more about their history and the expense involved in raising meat in the UK. They have some pretty strict feeding and medication regulations for slaughter animals. Where here in the USA, we administer antibiotics, growth hormones and have no issues with GMO corn, in the UK you cannot do any of that and sell the meat. So it's hard to import meat and feed and Britain isn't exactly a great place to raise cattle being cold and wet a lot of the time.
Britain has a perfectly acceptable climate for cattle. There is lots of pastoral land in Britain dedicated to dairy or beef herds. (More dairy than beef however).
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Because it's dangerous. You'd need to change the manufacturing process significantly to account for it. If you breathe in leaked CO2, you feel a bit weird and back off. If you breathe in leaked N2, you fall unconscious almost instantly. With a bad leak, you'll never wake up.
Nitrogen's fine in the regular air that we breathe, because air also contains O2 and CO2, but pure N2? That's a disaster waiting to happen.
Using CO is another alternative for meat processing to increase the look and colouration. Has been for a very long time, CO2 is the big thing in some countries instead because of health regulations(i.e. the person butchering/preparing can die if they're a retard). Most places where CO is used for final preparation is all done by machines now anyway.
Om, nomnomnom...
They're not even an ok brewer.
Which almost explains the Pink Floyd lines.
'Pudding' is generic for dessert...British 'Meat' is awful, even worse once boiled. Best to grind the _whole_ animal and stuff it into its own stomach with thistles.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Cut down more of those pesky CO2 sucking trees. That ought to solve the problem.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
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
>Well, since the air we breathe is something like 85% nitrogen, why not just sub Nitrogen for CO2?
Because CO2 dissolves in water and forms carbonic acid. Nitrogen gas does not dissolve and will quickly dissipate quickly after injection into a solution. This is why nitrogen is added to Guinness at the time it is dispensed...it won't stay in solution, and is the reason you don't buy "nitro brews" in regular growlers.
ll enjoy my cold carbonated beer in the US.
Assuming your boss will give you time off...
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
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...
Good thing we don't have to deal with that here in the US!
#DeleteChrome
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?
I assume you left of the /sarcasm code. If the beach is at the edge of salt water the water is not too useful for drinking or irrigation. It can be made so with enough energy input for reverse osmosis deionization or distillation.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
But if this is gonna make it hard to get my beloved Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout, then I'm gonna get perturbed.
#DeleteChrome
This is correct. CO maintains the bright red color of the meat.
Either of those would actually be better than CO2 for that use. CO2 would cause respiratory panic where the others wouldn't.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Maybe people were selling naked futures and making it impossible to see the shortage coming?
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.
A solution of meat?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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.
A solution of meat?
I was specifically talking about beer, having missed the topmost comment about meat. One reason for not using Nitrogen for slaughterhouses (higher suffocation risk for humans) has already been mentioned, plus add to that the fact that compressed Nitrogen gas is generally more expensive than compressed CO2.
I'm not an expert on the subject, but the articles I can find suggest that if it is properly calibrated CO2 doesn't cause respiratory panic, although there are other articles critical of the method because it often isn't properly calibrated.
Butthurt swamp german detected.
Grolsch is better. But when it comes to making good beer in _industrial_ quantities, the Germans own it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I would guess this should affect draft beer in bars
Not real draft beers since these come from a cask, not a pressurized keg.
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"
Let them eat beer.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
* 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.
78% nitrogen.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The CO2 is used to bring the meat up to room temperature before slicing.
In the past, global warming made this a simple process because, fuck!, the CO2 was right there in the atmosphere.
However, despite lack of enthusiasm by the US, the Paris Agreement has already had effects of reducing carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, the US still has beer.
There's a lesson in there somewhere.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
No. It's just market forces optimizing for profits in one industry at the expense of supply in another. Throw in a dash of globalism and just in time corner cutting.
Basically, cheap import ammonia means local ammonia plants have chosen to stay closed a little longer after the annual maintenance shut down due to low margins for production. In turn, that means not capturing and compressing the waste CO2.
Due to cost cutting, there isn't enough inventory on hand to ride out the production gap.
Why are you so anxious to make everybody into a slave?
Oh sure, if you feed them grass and hay, Britain has that. But face it, Britain is an island with limited acreage for doing this, so they have a hard time producing a lot of cattle for slaughter.
The issue is it's hard/expensive to do the feed lot thing. You know, where the cattle stand around eating themselves silly on corn to put on as much weight as possible in the time allowed. Growing grains like corn takes a lot of space and feed lots take a lot of grain. Britain doesn't have the space or climate to grow all that grain.
As a result, they get mostly grass fed meat, which takes longer, makes the meat tougher with more connective tissue and less fat. Some folks like the stronger taste of grass fed, but most of us (in the USA at least) are predisposed to like what we normally get in the grocery store. Young fat cattle that are given growth hormones and fed lots of grain which is more tender and has a milder taste.
However, to their credit, they do grow a lot of sheep which are much better suited to their climate and are a bit more efficient when working from just grass. They have some good lamb over there, it just doesn't appeal to your average US beef and chicken eater....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Go crazy?
British 'Meat' is awful, even worse once boiled.
But eventually they learned not to boil everything.
But when it comes to making good beer in _industrial_ quantities, the Germans own it.
Best backhanded compliment of the day.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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.
The bolt machines don't stun the animal they kill it.
The bolt, moving at several hundred feet per second backed by thousands of pounds of force generated hydraulically, penetrates the base of the skull into the brain stem a couple inches and severs the body brain connection resulting in instant death and no pain. They are incredibly humane, certainly way more so than exposing the animal to a high concentration of C02 which would cause extensive distress and pain to the animal before it passed out.
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
LOL. I have no idea what the other AC is going on about. If anything, I thought somebody might call me out on CO2 also having oxygen, and that I should have specified O2 in particular. Just goes to show, you can't cover all the bases on how they might pick you apart.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It gets better than that. They have convinced many more that only libertarians would do that.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Why ? PETA people would love it if butchers die of CO poisoning.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
They will get a taste what happens when Brexit is done and they are out of far more stuff than just CO2.
CO2 is used to push the beer through the lines to the bar tap. Feel free to come up with a better, food safe, and low maintenance solution.
British government announces emergency polluters to be activated.
a pump
many real ales used pump based bar taps
Oh sure, if you feed them grass and hay, Britain has that. But face it, Britain is an island with limited acreage for doing this, so they have a hard time producing a lot of cattle for slaughter.
The issue is it's hard/expensive to do the feed lot thing. You know, where the cattle stand around eating themselves silly on corn to put on as much weight as possible in the time allowed. Growing grains like corn takes a lot of space and feed lots take a lot of grain. Britain doesn't have the space or climate to grow all that grain.
As a result, they get mostly grass fed meat, which takes longer, makes the meat tougher with more connective tissue and less fat. Some folks like the stronger taste of grass fed, but most of us (in the USA at least) are predisposed to like what we normally get in the grocery store. Young fat cattle that are given growth hormones and fed lots of grain which is more tender and has a milder taste.
However, to their credit, they do grow a lot of sheep which are much better suited to their climate and are a bit more efficient when working from just grass. They have some good lamb over there, it just doesn't appeal to your average US beef and chicken eater....
You'd actually be surprised how much grains and agricultural land there is in the UK. Sure, the UK maybe only 1/50th the land area and houses 1/6th the population of the US; but cities are much more compact than in the US, and pretty much all the land is usable for agriculture- (at least until you get to Scotland). The mountain ranges are pretty tame and can even be farmed, it doesn't get very hot, but it actually doesn't get as cold as most of the US either, meaning a lot of things will grow in the UK better than the US. We have no deserts or tundra or salt plains taking up our land area. You're right, a larger portion is dedicated to sheep than in the US- but also: cows.
Pretty much all land in the UK is used for something. I was amazed when I moved to the US how little land seems to have been cultivated- there is so much unused land (which is a good thing for ecology)- Britain has used every square inch out of necessity.
Maize isn't ideally suited for the UK (although is still grown) - it can still be imported really cheap. Ever since Mr. Bush placed massive subsidies on maize, the US has had huge surpluses of cheap grain thanks to the US tax payers- that the rest of the world can get hold of cheap US grain that would otherwise just rot. Britain thanks the US tax payers for paying for most of the cost of their maize for them. (Note on use of the word corn- it's a regional word and is used generically in every country as the main grain crop- so corn means barley in Scotland, wheat in England, who knows what in Australia- probably poisonous 'drop bear spider weed').
Wheat and Barley grows fantastic in the UK. You're right though, Britain doesn't grow as many cows for beef as say, the US, and it probably is climate related: the TYPES of cows that do best in Britain ARE dairy cows. Friesians (dairy cows) are the most common in the UK. I believe these are closely related to the Schleswig-Holstein cows that the US also uses in places like Wisconin and Vermont.
10 million cows in the UK. 40 million in the US. Per capita (and certainly per square mile) there are more cows in the UK than the US. 1/4 the cows on 1/50th the land area.
Regarding grass fed; I think a lot of people prefer grass-fed cattle once they get used to it, although it is a personal preference. Here in the US it's a bit of a delicacy and people will pay more for it (they have to because it is more expensive). It's also much healthier it has a better fat composition since the cows are getting THEIR fat from leaves rather than seeds. Personally, I'm not much of a beef eater. Give me a pork chop, a lamb shank, a piece of salmon or a curried chicken over a beef steak any-day.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
ll enjoy my cold carbonated beer in the US.
Assuming your boss will give you time off...
The hour between finishing work at 8pm and getting to bed at 9pm so you can get up for work at 5am is plenty of time to drink the one bottle of beer a day you are allowed before being sacked as an alcoholic.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I panicked at the headline but real beer and good meat would not make use of extra CO2 anyway.
LOL.. I will say, you guys have the BEST curry I've ever had. I cannot find anything to compare to what I had on that week in Manchester.
Personally, I like grass fed beef, but I was raised on a farm and we raised our own, so it was cheap.. For us anyway.
In the USA we are not in a position where we have to use all our land for farming and ranching. We also have large swaths of land which are unsuitable for said use due to lack of rain, topography and soil composition. But we raise a LOT of stuff on the land we use. Wheat, Corn, soybeans, cotton and more are abundant here.
By the way.. The reason you have so many more cows per person is because grass feeding and not using hormones to stimulate growth lengthens the time from birth to market weight and lowers the dairy production per cow. You need more of them to keep up with the population. In the USA we produced 23 Billion pounds in 2015 and in the UK they produced 1.8 Billion pounds in 2017 (a banner year). Really, per person beef production rates are far higher in the USA and we use a lot less of our land mass for it. Dairy has similar stats. Our population here in the USA is about 326 million to UK's 66 million. You guys do a LOT less beef...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Didn't intend it to be backhanded.
Just for example: Lagunitas Pils (N Cal) is as good as anything made in Germany, but it costs $15/12. In Germany you get a case for about 9 euro, a German case is almost exactly 5 American six packs.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
One may debate this I guess, but having slaughtered animals (chickens, turkeys, pigs and cows) personally I can tell you that bolt stunning is far from perfect and doesn't always work. CO2 stunning has similar issues if not done correctly, but the process can be better controlled though automation and is less dependent on personal skill. I've never seen this CO2 thing done, but reading about it, sure indicates to me that it CAN be better, less stressful for the animals and safer for the people doing it.
I don't care how you slice it.. Slaughtering animals is a messy process (pun intended). Trying to stun a cow by a blow to the head may be the traditional approach, and I felt was quite humane considering. CO2 stunning seems a bit better with a lot less stress on the animals involved. Certainly for poultry this is a huge advantage as the slaughtering methods available there are pretty gruesome.
In short, I don't agree with you. C02 stunning is indeed effective and seems much more humane to this old farm boy.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Um.... That's nice in theory, but in practice, not so much.
If you don't think you can handle graphic descriptions of slaughtering animals, stop reading here OK? Fair warning..
You really are stunning the animal with a bolt gun. Sure, you may have scrambled their brain enough that they are going to die and hopefully have lost consciousness with the first blow, it doesn't always happen that way. I've witnessed cases where the animal was for all intents and purposes dead, where they where NOT going to survive the brain injury from the bolt, which where still on their feet and reacting to visual stimuli. I heard of one case where the animal was stunned and down, but awoke later and had to be stunned again. It happens. So, the POINT of the bolt gun is to stun badly enough to kill, but the animal is NOT dead when they hit the ground, but unconscious. They are breathing, their hearts are beating, but unconscious as the slaughtering process gets underway.
C02 stunning doesn't always cause fear and panic. It can, if done properly, be just the opposite and produce humane results in a manor that can be automated and not subject to a human's ability to hit the right spot with the bolt, which requires some skill and/or the confining of the animal's head. So I'm not sure how you think bolt guns are better, with all the forcible handling and confinement required to immobilize the animal enough to stun it, over just entering a small enclosed space and stunned by something you cannot see, smell or feel.
Slaughtering is a messy business and doing it both safely and humanely is always an issue. However, the quality of the product going though slaughter is improved by keeping the animals calm as long as possible, hopefully right up to the instant they loose consciousness. Any killing method can cause distress in the animal. C02 seems to be the best solution to me, especially for small animals. When done right with larger ones, can cause loss of consciousness with the least distress. But like all methods, it has to be done right.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You can google "controlled atmosphere stunning" and see plenty of places are doing it with CO2, so clearly it's not doubtful anyone would try a CO2 controlled atmosphere more than once.
They could collect the nitrous oxide waste products released in the production of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and use that to kill the cows. They'll probably dig it.
Nitrogen could also be used with no panic... Just use an oxygen concentrator to slowly suck all the oxygen out of the room, bottle it up, and sell it on the market.
I don't know about the comparable economics of either of these but at least one is getting extra use out of a environmentally harmful waste gas before it's dumped into the atmosphere.... the other is producing a marketable side-output.