Buzz Kill: Beer vs. Ethanol

Why your favorite six-pack could soon cost 11 bucks.

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Bitter Harvest: The price of hops quintupled last year, partly due to bad weather in growing regions—hail and tornadoes in Slovenia and the Czech Republic, floods in England, and wet summers in Germany, the source of a third of the world’s hops. Blame global warming?

Damn You, Ethanol!: As biofuel stokes high corn prices, more barley is being used to feed livestock. The Brewers Association reports that barley prices jumped by as much as 100 percent last year.

No Beer for Oil: $100/barrel oil makes driving the beer truck and making bottles more expensive.

Kicking the Can: The price of aluminum, used to make pop-tops, is high, partly due to the Chinese construction boom. Meanwhile, 400,000 steel kegs were stolen in 2006, presumably to be melted down on the black market.

Brewed Awakening: Brewers are cutting production of their hoppiest beers such as ipas. And there’s more bad news: The British Beer and Pub Association predicts that the cost of a pint could almost double by summertime. Stateside, you can expect to pay 50 cents more for a pint of your favorite microbrew. Budweiser and Coors drinkers need not worry, though; the big breweries’ prices are expected to stay flat.

 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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