Yo Wagner...Good art. on...

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Beer Kegs!
I noticed your new Ava pic, Big R; thought you might enjoy this
article on beer kegs becoming closely guarded!
From the Asheville Citizen-Times...
BR,mD

Watching the kegs

Beer industry keeps close tabs on containers as theft, prices soar


by John Boyle, [email protected]
published July 15, 2007 12:15 am

When you order up an ice-cold beer at your local watering hole, you probably don’t think much about the container that held that bubbly brew.

But rest assured your local brewer does, especially since prices for empty, stainless steel kegs have doubled in the past year, taking a serious toll on production costs and leading to a rash of suspicious keg disappearances.

“We’ve bought kegs three times this year, with the third batch arriving this week,” said Oscar Wong, president of Highland Brewing in Asheville. “It went from $87 a keg last November to $150 plus freight. So you’re talking close to 160 bucks for a keg.”

Nationwide, beer makers expect to lose hundreds of thousands of kegs and millions of dollars this year as those stainless steel holders are stolen and sold for scrap. Some customers also forgo their deposits of $10 to $30, opting to sell to scrap dealers at $15 to $55 a keg.

In some cases they just don’t want to go to the trouble of returning it.
“We get a call every now and then from people who move into a house and say, ‘We found two of your kegs in the basement,’” Wong said. “We had one where a guy said he went to a party, and there was a piece of plywood over four of our small kegs.”

Major industry losses

The beer industry is working with the scrap metal recycling industry to let buyers know they can’t accept kegs unless the breweries sell them. Some are also moving to higher deposits on kegs, which they hope will ensure the containers are returned.

The Beer Institute, the industry’s main trade group, estimates the annual industry loss at $50 million, said Jeff Becker, the group’s president. He said about 12 percent of the nation’s beer is sold in kegs, and in the past few years breweries have collectively lost about 300,000 kegs a year, out of about 10.7 million in circulation.

An empty keg barrel weighs about 30 pounds, and the scrap price for stainless steel peaked at about $1.50 to $1.70 a pound last month, said Marty Forman, president of Forman Metal in Milwaukee. It dropped to 50 to 70 cents a pound recently, which may provide some relief to brewers.
Gerry Sigmon, general manager of Skyland Distributors in Asheville, which distributes beer for 38 suppliers and handles about 30,000 kegs a month, expects theft to remain a problem.

Some is from retail establishments that leave kegs outside, some is off of back porches and some is from scrap yards that don’t ask questions about beer containers.

Although Skyland doesn’t buy kegs directly, it is responsible for kegs shipped to it by suppliers. Small craft breweries rely on kegs for 40-50 percent of their business, while the major domestic producers ship about 15 percent of their beer in kegs.

“All of our suppliers at one time or another do a cooperage audit or a cooperage reconciliation,” Sigmon said, explaining that they essentially inventory all the kegs they’ve shipped, what they’ve gotten back and what Skyland still has on hand. “If there’s a negative balance — i.e. we’ve lost some kegs to thievery or they’ve been shipped to other markets — then we could wind up paying a significant economic price. But right now most of the onus is on the suppliers who have to continually replace cooperage because of the losses from various sources.”

Steel is the standard

With the worldwide demand for steel soaring and prices following suit, keg prices are going to remain high, further cutting into the profit margin.
Wong said Highland noticed three or four years ago that it was losing some kegs and bought a software program that tracks their kegs with a bar code. Still, with 3,000 kegs in its operations, some disappearances are inevitable.

Highland charges a $20 deposit fee when selling a keg of beer, but Wong knows that’s probably unrealistically low, especially considering he has bought 800 kegs this year at the $160 price.

“We probably should increase it, and a lot of discussions are going on among the brewers about doing that, but we’re all kind of looking at each other and seeing who will blink first,” Wong said.

Brewers have tried plastic and aluminum kegs, but nothing holds up as well or is as easy to clean as stainless steel.

“Ours are 30-plus years old and from all over the country — God knows what brewery number we are to use them,” Jason Caughman, owner of Pisgah Brewing in Asheville said with a laugh. “They come into contact with concrete floors and get banged up pretty bad. Here and there they might have a pinhole, but overall they really hold up.”

Pisgah, which moved to Asheville from Charleston, S.C., two years ago, gets its kegs from Palmetto Brewing, which periodically buys newer, more expensive kegs to replace its old-fashioned ones with a bung plug on the side.

The price to Pisgah is just right — $20 apiece. Caughman knows that Pisgah, a smaller brewer with accounts limited primarily to Buncombe County, will have to switch out to the $160 models sooner or later, but they’re riding the used keg wave as long as possible.

When they buy new kegs, they’ll also have to buy a new kegwasher and at least 100 kegs, a total that will approach $25,000.

“It’ll be a good investment, when we get to that point,” Caughman said.


http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pb...D=200770713098