Free Republic

CARACAS, Venezuela—The largest private Venezuelan company and producer of 80% of the beer consumed here began to shut down its last beer plant on Friday, the latest deprivation in a country crippled by shortages. After Empresas Polar SA closed its three other beer plants over the past several days, the shutting of the San Joaquin plant, near Valencia, will leave just a week’s supply of beer, the company said. Like many other firms here, Polar blames the government, which hasn’t allocated the dollars the company needs to pay for imported raw materials such as malted barley. President Nicolás Maduro’s government...

Venezuela's largest privately-owned beer company has stopped producing beer after running out of malted barley (or, more specifically, running out of foreign currency with which to buy malted barley). The company, Empresas Polar, stopped production yesterday—it warned last week that it would run out of malted barley by then. Polar is putting "your drunk uncle's favorite political forecast to the test," Francisco Toro of the Caracas Chronicles wrote. "You know the one I'm talking about, right? That one uncle of yours who gets drunk at every family gathering and starts to rant about how the only way we're going to...

It's come to this: The country with the largest oil reserves in the world can't afford to brew its own beer, stay in its own time zone, or even have its own people show up to work more than two times a week. Venezuela, in other words, is well past the point of worrying that its economy might collapse. It already has. That's the only way to describe an economy that the International Monetary Fund thinks is going to shrink 8 percent and have 720 percent inflation this year. And that's not even the worst of it. No, that's the...

Life isn’t much fun these days in the world’s socialist paradise. If you had to choose a country you didn’t want to live in, Venezuela would be near the top of the list. Corrupt, dysfunctional, bankrupt, crime-ridden, drug-infested, short of practically every basic commodity, it can’t keep the lights on, keep the government running or brew its own beer. Last weekend six army officers were arrested for stealing goats from a farm because they were hungry. Venezuela has become the basket case of the western hemisphere, a case study on how not to run a country and a living example...

Venezuelans grumbling over the scarcity of food and toilet paper may soon face another shortage, beer produced by Empresas Polar SA., the country’s largest private company and biggest beer maker. Polar said on Thursday that it will be forced to stop producing beer next week because it cannot get the U.S. dollars, which are controlled by the government, to import the malted barley needed to brew. Under Venezuela’s stringent currency exchange system, only the government can legally control dollars, which companies need to import raw materials, food, machine parts and other supplies.

Venezuela's government has said it will turn off electricity supply in its 10 most populous states for four hours a day for at least 40 days to deal with a severe power shortage.(Snip)Recently, the country's main brewery Polar, which is part of Venezuela's largest cooperative Empresas Polar, announced that it would stop production as a result of financial difficulties. The company, which produces 80 percent of the country's beer, says thousands of workers will lose their jobs as a result of the stoppage.