Brewers paying more for hops, barley

As farmers devote more acreage to the lucrative corn crops that can be used to make ethanol, one effect has been to decrease production of the hops and barley essential to making beer. A warehouse fire in Washington State that destroyed up to $4 million worth of surplus hops in 2006 and a bad growing season in 2007 have compounded the shortage.

Those who make and drink craft beers are crying in their lager.

Hops are the flowers that give beers their distinctive flavors and aromas. At Buckner Brewing Co. in downtown Cape Girardeau, brewmaster Mike Mills has been unable to procure the varieties needed for his recipes. The few hops he can get are of lesser quality and have increased in price from $3.50 a pound to almost $20 a pound now. A 450-gallon batch of Porter, the company's most robust beer, requires 13.5 pounds of hops.

Barley composes 80 to 90 percent of each batch of beer. Buckner Brewing's price for barley has gone up from 36 cents a pound to 42 cents. That doesn't sound exorbitant, but the microbrewery uses 800 to 850 pounds of barley to make a batch of beer.

So far, Buckner Brewing has not raised the price of a glass of beer. But no relief from the predicament is in sight. "The price is going to fall back down to the customers slightly," Mills predicted.

Large breweries are not currently affected by the shortages because they have long-term contracts with their suppliers. River Eagle in Cape Girardeau, which distributes Anheuser-Busch products, is not seeing an effect. A distribution contract with the St. Louis brewery will prevent even the few microbrewery beers River Eagle handles from going up in price. "The prices are locked in," said sales manager Shawn Patterson.

The same is true at Bluff City Beer, which distributes Miller products and Foster's, and Kohlfeld Distributing, which handles Coors, Stag and Pabst beers and some imports. Bluff City sales manager Doug Sanders said beer prices usually increase once a year anyway to account for inflation and rising costs. But that increase is usually no more than 30 cents per case and shouldn't be more this year.

Mike Kohlfeld, owner of Kohlfeld Distributing in Jackson, said he agreed with the other distributors that it won't affect local prices.

"At some point it will. It's like any other resource," he said.

Buckner Brewing has located a farm in Washington State that has some hops. "We're going to get what we can. We might have to tweak the recipe a little bit," Mills said.

He's already had to adjust the recipe of a beer he made Friday, cutting back on the hops by 20 percent to make sure the batch would last three or four months. "We're cutting corners without trying to damage the integrity of the beer," he said.

Mills has experimented with camomile, lavender, blueberries, cherries and rosemary as substitutes for hops and could use them if no hops could be found.

A few of Buckner Brewing's devoted customers who are former farmers or gardeners have started growing hops for the brewery, but like grapevines, the plants that produce hops take three or four years to mature, Mills said.

"We don't know exactly what's going to happen," he said.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137