A CO2 Shortage is Causing a Beer and Meat Crisis in Britain (qz.com) 320
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is used in the production of a wide variety of food and drink products. But with at least five CO2 producers across northern Europe offline, a shortfall in the gas is causing shortages in beer, fizzy drinks, and meat. From a report: Britain is particularly affected because the seasonal shutdown of the plants has meant that the UK has only one big plant producing CO2 left. The British Beer and Pub Association, along with individual beer producers and pubs, has warned of the crisis caused by the shortage. Without naming companies, the trade association said the shortfall has caused beer production shortages. Heineken, the UK's biggest brewer, said its CO2 supplier was facing "a major issue" in the UK. Meanwhile, one of Britain's biggest pub chains, Wetherspoons, said it'll be forced to pull a number of beers and fizzy drinks from its menu soon.
Let's set aside our political differences (Score:5, Funny)
If the entire Slashdot community can agree on *anything*, it should be that a shortage of meat and beer is indeed a crisis worthy of drastic government intervention.
Re:Let's set aside our political differences (Score:5, Insightful)
Cue the vegetarians, vegans, teetotallers, puritans, and other idiots.
If the entire Slashdot community ever agreed upon anything, it would be a very bad sign. ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If the entire Slashdot community ever agreed upon anything, it would be a very bad sign. ;-)
Does anyone disagree with me when I say slashdot has gone severely down hill compared to 15 years ago?
Re: (Score:2)
He said 'cue' not 'cook'.
Re: (Score:2)
Have to burn them real hot or you get a dirty burn. Taints the beer.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Europe needs a new Marshal plan...The Trump Plan...get 747 cargo planes full of industrial CO2 tanks to Europe's breweries ASAP. Follow up with repurposed liquified natural gas tankers full of CO2.
We'll just ship them good American beef, they like it. They're beef producers will just need to buy more corn from us after the crisis is over, to get their quality up.
Re: (Score:2)
straight edgers probably disagree... just sayin :)
Re: (Score:2)
If the entire Slashdot community can agree on *anything*, it should be that a shortage of meat and beer is indeed a crisis worthy of drastic government intervention.
How much you wanna bet it is the fault of government via over-regulation?
Greedy capitalists can keep commodities supplied, if not oversupplied.
Re: (Score:2)
Since I actually RTFA, I'd love to take that bet.
Re:Let's set aside our political differences (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, this is the all wise and powerful market running around with it's pants around it's ankles.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Still waiting.
Re: (Score:2)
FTFY
You can't... (Score:5, Funny)
Beer shortage in England? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
can we blame Brexit
Re: (Score:2)
You can always blame Brexit. Or the weather.
Re: (Score:2)
I went to Liverpool when I was in Uncle Sam's Yacht Club back in the 60s.
At the first bar to starboard, the fucking beer was warm!
No cold beer at all.
It was horrid.
Hold me?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So much for global warming. (Score:2)
Seriously, this seems like an easy problem to solve. We have too much in one place and not enough in another place.
Can't we just extract it from the air and bottle it for the people who need it?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wait a minute... (Score:2)
I thought that the UK was at the epicenter of the movement for real ale, which doesn't need any extraneous CO2.
There's no problem with beers (Score:2)
Beers don't need CO2, it is produced during the fermentation... unless you call your self a brewmaster but you are in fact a chemist.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:There's no problem with beers (Score:5, Informative)
Technically true, but that's not how the industrial process works.
During fermentation, CO2 is given off, but most of it escapes. If you do bottle fermentation (much homebrew, a few craft brands), you add a bit more sugar to the mix right before bottling. The issue is, there has to be live yeast still in the liquid, and as it ferments you'll get a residue of yeast at the bottom, which you have to be careful not to stir up unless you want the cloudiness, extra yeasty flavor, and don't mind some possible digestive issues. You then also have to leave the beer at fermentation temperature for another couple of weeks for it to fully carbonate. This means increased storage time and required space, and there's still a risk that the actual carbonation level is somewhat inconsistent.
Most commercial brewers let the beer fully ferment, and all CO2 gasses off. They also filter the beer, removing yeast and any other impurities, so that it's clear and shiny, but also organically dead and totally flat. During bottling they inject CO2 back into the brew mechanically to carbonate it with precision control. Then it can be shipped and/or refrigerated immediately, no extra storage or time required.
Not mentioned in the summary (Score:2)
What is the impact on global warming? /s
Re: (Score:2)
Dunno, but you can bet, women and children are the worst hit. As they always are...
Let them use nitrogen! (Score:2)
I'm guessing the flow of Guiness [wikipedia.org] is unaffected as they use nitrogen instead of CO2 in their taps.
Problem solved... (Score:2)
Heineken is a UK brewer now? (Score:2)
Simple solution (Score:2)
Why does this affect beer? (Score:2)
When I made beer, the yeast made all the CO2 necessary.
Re: (Score:2)
oh that stuff that tastes like diluted yak piss?
fuck it, this shortage is a good thing
Give up meat and fizzy drinks... no problem (Score:2)
Since I don't eat meat or drink fizzy drinks, this would not be a problem for me. Probably would be healthier for most people to give up meat (heart disease, cancer) and fizzy drinks (diabetes, heart disease).
OTOH, Beer would be a problem. We all need beer for good health.
(Maybe we could prioritize beer over meat and fizzy drinks with a "national CO2 rationing board".)
I couldn't care less about Heineken (Score:2)
But if this is gonna make it hard to get my beloved Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout, then I'm gonna get perturbed.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Texas - where Men are Men and Sheep are Scared.
Re: (Score:2)
Lone Star 'beer'.
Worse than American Budweiser. Piss. Mexican beer is better, even Carona.
Do you know why Texans hate Okies? Because they're exactly alike.
Re: (Score:2)
Obsidian Oatmeal Stout.
Made in the USA, yeast in bottle. No worries.
I'm confused (Score:4, Funny)
I thought we were in a crisis because of too much CO2. Now there's a shortage?
Opportunity for cask drawn ales (Score:3)
Re:Opportunity for cask drawn ales (Score:5, Funny)
Having very little carbonation brings out light and delicate flavors in the beer that are usually masked by having lots of C02. My favorite are cask drawn IPAs.
How can you even tell? In my experience, the only ingredient you can taste in most IPAs is the overwhelming amount of hops.
Seasonal shutdown? (Score:3)
Why the hell would there be a seasonal shutdown when there is year-round demand?
Then again, this is Britain we're talking about. Logic has long been hard to come by there.
Re: (Score:3)
Why the hell would there be a seasonal shutdown when there is year-round demand?
That's an easy one. Basically it's not cost effective to produce CO2 by itself. CO2 production is usually a byproduct of air-separation and hydrogen generation at oil refineries, bio-ethanol plants, or (and the biggest one in the UK) ammonia plants. The shutdown of refineries and bio-ethanol plants are not within the control of the CO2 suppliers, but they favour summer due to reduced weather delays and improved efficiencies of workers not freezing their tits off.
The ammonia plants on the other hand ... they
Typical (Score:2)
* UK has only one big plant producing CO2 left."
All the world tries to reduce the emission of CO2 and the Brits have a factory mass-producing it, ts-ts.
Lovely Day for a Guinness (Score:3)
Why not use nitrogen instead?
Global warming? (Score:4, Funny)
That is what they get for buying into the global warming/CO2 is bad story. They need a machine that will suck CO2 from the air and put it into the bottles they use in the beer & meat industry.
Re: (Score:3)
Jokes aside you know how little CO2 is in the air right? If you are getting CO2 as a result of separating it from the air, ... there's some other steps in between. We for instance separate the air, toss the CO2 away, take the pure O2, combine it with natural gas in a partial oxidation gasifier to create syngas which gets passed through a shift reaction to generate CO2 + H2, the H2 is then used in the oil refinery, the CO2 is purified and put in the beer.
And if you think that sounds bad, remember the other w
Re: (Score:2)
I would guess this should affect draft beer in bars, but why not use natural carbonation in the bottles?
It works when I brew beer and bottle it (although I do prefer to keg it and use CO2 myself, but I do still bottle some).
Mass production probably uses CO2 (Score:3)
When making beer at home, the fermentation produces CO2 and you get whatever amount of bubbly that the fermentation gives you.
When producing major national and international brands, I would think companies like Heineken have a very specific CO2 level for each brand, influenced by market research and other factors. I would expect they add or remove CO2 from each batch to consistently produce the same Heineken product every time.
Re:Mass production probably uses CO2 (Score:5, Funny)
You mean they make Heineken taste that way .. *on purpose*? Is the skunky taste from the green bottle intentional as well? =/
Re: (Score:2)
That's the Heineken bottle skunk, not universal, but universal on the west coast, USA.
Heineken in kegs tastes like they intend it. Which is still hard to believe. Alka-seltzer, but not skunky alka-seltzer.
Re: (Score:2)
yeah, maybe the dutch should stick to wooden shoes, windmills, and prostitution.
Re: (Score:2)
Butthurt swamp german detected.
Grolsch is better. But when it comes to making good beer in _industrial_ quantities, the Germans own it.
Re: (Score:3)
"It's generally true of any country that the stuff that's exported isn't the best."
No, it isn't.
It is generally true of any country that the best stuff goes to the highest bidder. For a lot of countries that means foreign market.
Re:Mass production probably uses CO2 (Score:5, Funny)
"German beer makers have to capture their own Co2 to use later during bottling."
Which only makes sense.
Everybody knows natural CO2 is much better than the artificial one. Who wants chemicals into his beer!?
Re: (Score:3)
Other than home-brew, beer is rarely carbonated using secondary fermentation. Even at my local brew-pub, the carbonation as served at the tap, is done through mechanical carbonation of the product tanks. Also storing the beer under CO2 dramatically extends the period of time that it will stay fresh in the kegs and/or serving tanks.
The only time you see secondary fermentation used in mass market is in specialty brews, cask festivals, and similar specialty beer types. Otherwise it's just too unpredictable.
Re:not the beer (Score:5, Informative)
You're not in the UK, are you? Real ale is pretty widely available, hand pumped from the cask and relies on secondary fermentation. In the US it's harder to find, but available in bars that specialize in that sort of thing.
Re:not the beer (Score:4, Informative)
Belgian beer is bottle conditioned.
At least the good stuff, I'm not talking about Stella.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
but why not use natural carbonation in the bottles?
Many people don't like yeast residue in their beer. It also means the bottle has to sit and age 2 weeks or so before it can be refrigerated and shipped, adding time and storage requirements to the process. It's much cheaper and faster to inject it mechanically and ship it immediately than to let it sit and ferment naturally.
Re: (Score:3)
Cask vs Keg (Score:2)
I would guess this should affect draft beer in bars
Not real draft beers since these come from a cask, not a pressurized keg.
Re: (Score:2)
Draught beer isn't bottled, that's it.
I make my own beer from barley, yeast and hops and when it's done I put it in a corny keg, bring the co2 to 60psi and roll the keg back and forth in my lap for a few minutes, let it rest for an hour and blow off the excess pressure and drink it.
Only an obnoxious elitist would chime in with bullshit about how it's not real draught.
Re: (Score:3)
You really answered your own question, it's easier to just keg it. You could naturally carbonate in the keg, of course, but you probably want to drink that beer sooner.
And could you imagine the fuss if somebody found a yeast layer in a bottle of Buttwiper? They'd freak. There's no way a typical macrobrew drinker would understand that it's supposed to be that way.
Re:not the beer (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Beer and soda I understand (Score:5, Informative)
Modern slaughterhouses use CO2 for "controlled atmosphere stunning" to render the animals unconscious before slaughter.
Re: (Score:2)
There's plenty of other inert gases they could use for that though? Nitrogen or Argon would work just as well, no?
Re: (Score:2)
Using CO is another alternative for meat processing to increase the look and colouration. Has been for a very long time, CO2 is the big thing in some countries instead because of health regulations(i.e. the person butchering/preparing can die if they're a retard). Most places where CO is used for final preparation is all done by machines now anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not an expert on the subject, but the articles I can find suggest that if it is properly calibrated CO2 doesn't cause respiratory panic, although there are other articles critical of the method because it often isn't properly calibrated.
Re: (Score:2)
Let them eat beer.
Re: (Score:2)
This is correct. CO maintains the bright red color of the meat.
Re:Beer and soda I understand (Score:5, Informative)
it's used as part of the packaging. Modified Atmosphere Packaging is a process where CO2 is pushed into the package removing all "air" before sealing. It stops nasty organisms growing in there.
it's common to see Nitrogen and CO2 as the gas. I don't know much more than the above, but I would imagine there is a wiki article to explain further. Oh, and i'm likely wrong about all of the above but the community will put me right
Re: (Score:2)
Well, since the air we breathe is something like 85% nitrogen, why not just sub Nitrogen for CO2?
Re: (Score:3)
Because making nitrogen from air is a resource-consuming process. Un-mixing two gases reduces their entropy, and the Second Law says you can't do that without making more entropy elsewhere. There are ways; if you know anyone in poor respiratory health, you may have seen an oxygen concentrator that does just that (except it throws away the nitrogen instead of the oxygen).
But the object is to get a non-oxidizing gas, and CO2 works for that, often with a cheaper process.
Oh, and it's 78%.
Re: (Score:2)
Because CO2 dissolves in water and forms carbonic acid. Nitrogen gas does not dissolve and will quickly dissipate quickly after injection into a solution. This is why nitrogen is added to Guinness at the time it is dispensed...it won't stay in solution, and is the reason you don't buy "nitro brews" in regular growlers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A solution of meat?
I was specifically talking about beer, having missed the topmost comment about meat. One reason for not using Nitrogen for slaughterhouses (higher suffocation risk for humans) has already been mentioned, plus add to that the fact that compressed Nitrogen gas is generally more expensive than compressed CO2.
Re: (Score:2)
78% nitrogen.
Re: (Score:2)
but meat? UK?
Have you ever had meat in the UK? They have strict rules about how livestock are fed and what medications/hormones can be given to animals destine for the meat packers. They forbid imports from countries (like the US) that don't follow the same rules, so beef is expensive and usually a lot more tough than what we get in the USA. Chicken and pork are similar. They have some good lamb though.
but alas, none of that has anything to do with the article.
Re: (Score:2)
They use CO2 in the packaging, because regular air has oxygen and would spoil it.
Re: (Score:3)
CO2 is used to stun animals before slaughter. It's more humane than just cutting straight to shooting a bolt into a cow's head to stun them.
But the reason for the cooking in the UK is more about their history and the expense involved in raising meat in the UK. They have some pretty strict feeding and medication regulations for slaughter animals. Where here in the USA, we administer antibiotics, growth hormones and have no issues with GMO corn, in the UK you cannot do any of that and sell the meat. So it
Re: (Score:2)
Brexit hasn't happened yet, you know. The restrictions you cite are due to the EU, and since the whole EU enforces them meat can be imported from the EU without problems.
Re: (Score:2)
CO2 is used to stun animals before slaughter. It's more humane than just cutting straight to shooting a bolt into a cow's head to stun them.
But the reason for the cooking in the UK is more about their history and the expense involved in raising meat in the UK. They have some pretty strict feeding and medication regulations for slaughter animals. Where here in the USA, we administer antibiotics, growth hormones and have no issues with GMO corn, in the UK you cannot do any of that and sell the meat. So it's hard to import meat and feed and Britain isn't exactly a great place to raise cattle being cold and wet a lot of the time.
Britain has a perfectly acceptable climate for cattle. There is lots of pastoral land in Britain dedicated to dairy or beef herds. (More dairy than beef however).
Re: (Score:3)
Oh sure, if you feed them grass and hay, Britain has that. But face it, Britain is an island with limited acreage for doing this, so they have a hard time producing a lot of cattle for slaughter.
The issue is it's hard/expensive to do the feed lot thing. You know, where the cattle stand around eating themselves silly on corn to put on as much weight as possible in the time allowed. Growing grains like corn takes a lot of space and feed lots take a lot of grain. Britain doesn't have the space or climate to
Re: (Score:2)
Which almost explains the Pink Floyd lines.
'Pudding' is generic for dessert...British 'Meat' is awful, even worse once boiled. Best to grind the _whole_ animal and stuff it into its own stomach with thistles.
Re: (Score:2)
The CO2 is used to bring the meat up to room temperature before slicing.
In the past, global warming made this a simple process because, fuck!, the CO2 was right there in the atmosphere.
However, despite lack of enthusiasm by the US, the Paris Agreement has already had effects of reducing carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, the US still has beer.
There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It amazes how they managed to brainwash young libertarians so that they will enjoy slavery.
Re: (Score:2)
ll enjoy my cold carbonated beer in the US.
Assuming your boss will give you time off...
Re: (Score:2)
No. It's just market forces optimizing for profits in one industry at the expense of supply in another. Throw in a dash of globalism and just in time corner cutting.
Basically, cheap import ammonia means local ammonia plants have chosen to stay closed a little longer after the annual maintenance shut down due to low margins for production. In turn, that means not capturing and compressing the waste CO2.
Due to cost cutting, there isn't enough inventory on hand to ride out the production gap.
Why are you so anx
Re:One Word - Stout (Score:4, Insightful)
little to no carbonation typically, also healthier if you believe the studies
More calories typically in your stouts... also much more flavour though... a superior product in my opinion. Stouts and Porters make up 90% of the beer I drink but I don't drink much because of the calories. When it comes to beer quality is more important than quantity.
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, if you put people who don't trust government in charge of government you've gotta kind of expect these sorts of things...
Good thing we don't have to deal with that here in the US!
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe people were selling naked futures and making it impossible to see the shortage coming?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Go crazy?