Posted on 11/01/2017 7:16:44 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
They are weeds!
In the 16th century, the Catholic Church had a stranglehold on beer production, since it held the monopoly on gruit — the mixture of herbs and botanicals (sweet gale, mug wort, yarrow, ground ivy, heather, rosemary, juniper berries, ginger, cinnamon) used to flavor and preserve beer. Hops, however, were not taxed. Considered undesirable weeds, they grew plentifully and vigorously — their invasive nature captured by their melodic Latin name, Humulus lupulus (which the music-loving Luther would have loved), which means “climbing wolf.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3600425/posts
Now I gotta break out the dang snowy tahrs...
CLIMATE CHANGE HURTING CRAFT BREWERIES! WOMEN AND MINORITIES HARDEST HIT! EXPERTS: WE”RE CONCERNED AND TROUBLED! BREWERS: WE”RE TROUBLED AND CONCERNED! FILM AT ELEVEN!
With the explosion of “craft” breweries, everyone and their dog ARE brewing beer.
https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/number-of-breweries/
From 2015 to 2016 the number of breweries increased by over 16%.
OK, I just had to look it up. Learned something new today.
Oh well, variety is the spice of life.
It does kind of encapsulate your thoughts when you hear a bunch of stories, doesn’t it?
What an amazing fabrication — [climate change has led to increasingly severe droughts. That’s...] “crippled crops”. US Hop production and yield (which is what would be affected if anything at all was a problem) has been tracked by the USDA for 103 years. Every single year since 2000 has ranked in the top 26 yields except 2016. 2016 has nothing to do with a trend, it is an outlier. BTW, 2016 ranked #45/103 for yield. 13 of the top 16 US hop yields have been achieved since 1999.
The difficulty in obtaining hops is much more about increased demand and nothing much to do with either climate change or reduced supply. US Production (gross tonnage) in 2016 was exceeded by only 1 prior year (2009) in the entire 103 year record. And 2017 saw even greater production.
Talk about fake news, and it was so easy to fact check!
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