Summary
U.S. barley farmers face mounting financial pressure as Trump’s tariffs spark fears of losing key export markets.
Canada, the top importer of U.S. malt barley, has already imposed retaliatory tariffs, and Mexico may follow. Farmers warn that rising fertilizer and chemical costs, combined with declining U.S. beer consumption, threaten their survival.
Breweries may absorb or pass higher costs to consumers, potentially raising beer prices.
Experts say tariffs could devastate barley exports, with industry leaders calling them a major blow to struggling American farmers.
The culture around beer shifted from cheap low alcohol content drinks with little variation, to more expensive high alcohol content drinks with a ton of variation. Then, as with anything that hits a “trend”, the market tries to capitalize on it beyond what demand actually cares to express, and prices go so far through the roof that nobody gives a shit anymore.
Nobody that was already drinking cares about the health issues (or at least they didn’t just suddenly change out of the blue). They just got a taste for something that gradually got priced out. If you got your taste for beers on fancy 10%ABV stouts that now cost $7 a can/bottle, you aren’t going to just buy whatever is now in your price range. You just stop buying beer, and get other shit.
I feel that. I love fancy crazy beers, but the prices are getting outrageous nowadays. Theres a four pack of cans that looks interesting at my local grocery store, but it’s almost 15 dollars for the privilege.
Do you know what I like even more than fancy beer? Not getting screwed and taken advantage of. At the end of the day, beer isn’t even healthy for me anyways–the choice to slow down or stop is no problem at all tbh.
15 is affordable by me. Highest I’ve seen is $33 for a 4 pack. Might as well just go out to a bar at that point.
Some of them feel like they are almost worth the expense. Founders makes some amazing beer of all varieties, and the Goose Island Bourbon County stouts are all phenomenal… But then there’s shit like Southern Tier trying to sell yet another stupid twist on a flavor nobody has ever done for $5 more than last year’s variety. It’s just pointless to engage in it now. Better off enjoying cheap wine.
Great insight, and really this is emblematic of the idiotic hyper-focus on growth, as much and as quickly as possible. It’s always better for society and broader stakeholders if growth happens organically. Growth should happen to satisfy growing demand, it should not be forced to go as fast as possible because there’s ridiculous money to be made by getting in early and inflating demand.
Every damn thing “investors” get a fuckin whiff of they ruin this way, housing being probably the worst (repeat!) offender. We have to figure out how to disincentivize this behavior. It guarantees toxic trash for industries in their wake and just further enriches the worst among us.
Edit: clarity
It’s all about financialization. Money people don’t care about product fundamentals anymore, they care about line go up.
Craft beer looked like a perfect investment because it was already a premium product with social caché (that incidentally was also addictive). But as the above comment notes, there isn’t an endless appetite for overpriced beer, especially when the market is flooded with shitty imitations from mass market beer companies.
The way to disincentivize it would be to let interest rates skyrocket (financialization only works if the cost of borrowing is effectively zero) but that would hurt regular people first and worst.
We could also vote in a socialist government who was willing to do things like seize corporate-owned housing and piss on the corpse of companies like Blackrock as their portfolios lose a significant percentage of their value but that seems remarkably unlikely.
Couldn’t agree more. There is no solution to this exploitative pattern that doesn’t involve drastically curtailing the profits made by participating in the pattern. The details matter obviously, but the situation is really that simple. There’s no solution for us that doesn’t require ending the rewards of this behavior for them.
It doesn’t help that alternatives have been lowering their prices. For example Wine prices have been decreasing due to a large amount of over-production. When a can of fancy beer cost $7 and a decent bottle of wine cost $9-12, economics wins out.
Oh and south central Washington (Yakima valley) is taking a beating on Hop prices. Most of those expensive beers have a lot of hops in their recipes. Add in they are highly dependent on immigrant labor and they are truly fucked for the next few years.