CLEARWATER, Fla. — The latest shortage is impacting many of your favorite drinks. Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is an important step in making soda, kombucha, and beer.
"Without CO2, we're basically not a brewery, so we couldn't do anything," Magnaminous Brewing employee Eric Holland said.
Carbon dioxide serves multiple purposes in the beer-making process.
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"It's probably the most important gas that we have," Holland continued. "We transfer beer with it, we carbonate beer with it, we package it into cans, kegs with it. We even use it to pour draft beer."
But there's trouble brewing with a nationwide CO2 shortage stemming from both the pandemic and contamination at one of the largest CO2 production sites.
"Friends of mine own a brewery in Boston, and they completely ran out of CO2," Holland said. "I almost didn't believe it when I saw it. I don't know how they do it. You'd be dead in the water without it."
Right now, Magnanimous Brewing isn't feeling the pinch. But Holland said that doesn't mean they're not prepared.
"We have a couple of contingencies in place. You know, no CO2, no beer, and no beer means we'd be in trouble," he added.
Big Storm Brewery President LJ Govoni said the price of CO2 has increased dramatically for them.
"Sometimes that factors to three to four times what we paid only two years ago," Govoni said.
But the brewery has an environmentally friendly workaround to generate the majority of its CO2.
"It is just taking that CO2 that is naturally generated by beer fermentation and storing it for future beer use," Govoni said.
CO2 is just one issue businesses are facing.
Inflation and other shortages still have the potential to drive up prices at your favorite stop.
"I suspect we'll see prices going up very soon for on-premise bars and restaurants, off-premise grocery store liquor stores, and no one's raising their prices because we want to raise our prices because we have to," Govini said.
