Oh, I think our resident wiseasses might have a few comments about this...
Beer Ping!
A low to medium ping list aimed at all of us who, well, love our beer…
FReepmail rzeznikj at stout or GOP_Raider to be added or struck from the list…
Posted on 03/12/2008 4:45:01 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Oh, I think our resident wiseasses might have a few comments about this...
Beer Ping!
A low to medium ping list aimed at all of us who, well, love our beer…
FReepmail rzeznikj at stout or GOP_Raider to be added or struck from the list…
Buddy of mine’s job was to crush the mistakes (underfill, overfill, mis-labeling, etc.) at the Coors Brewery in Golden. Some gets sold to the employees at a discount.
That’s waste beer!
When some some dumb ass sets their beer on the edge of the coffee table then Romo tosses the perfect touchdown to Witten and the beer gets knocked over during the ensuing cheering.
Seriously, after I make a batch I have this big pile of soggy grain husks left over. I use it for fertilizer. Used beer also makes good fertilizer but make sure the neighbors aren’t watching.
There are a lot of plants that have reduced outputs. I can see five off the top of my head that were 100 mmgy, and are now at best half of that. Some of them are shutting down because of high oil and gas prices, and some are moving to other feed stocks (cellulose). Many of those plants that are listed as "under construction" are not any more. I recently talked with an equipment manufacturer, who also makes stuff for ethanol plants, and said that there ethanol division is dead in the water. They will be scaling back their work force as a result (mostly in Sweden).
Second, the price of grain is not just the fault of ethanol. I know that is the whipping boy right now, but if you are in the farming or commodity business, it is clear that there are a lot more issues than ethanol. The wheat crop in the US was great last year, but the prices are still high. Same with the beans, and other grains. With high oil prices and a low dollar, it costs a lot more to raise crops than it did last year. So that cost should be passed on. Unless you want more subsides (which is what was done in the past) prices are going to rise, and they will go higher than they are now.
What is happening is that there is a change in how a lot of the world eats going on. Countries are paying top dollar for wheat, beans, and corn, and the American farmers are selling to them rather than at home. Heck, the guy my father custom feeds for is trying to get the paperwork done so he can ship hogs to China! It used to be that the US government had a very direct policy of keeping food so cheap that no one noticed it. What happened is that the farmers started looking for other markets.
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