Reviewers for a recent piece I’ve been working on uniformly hated one of my favorite lines, which introduced contemporary everyman-angst with something like
Once the prices of beer and oil went into their current trajectory…
The comments were that the reference didn’t fit in with the story (all too true), and that it didn’t make sense that the price of beer would go up just because the price of oil did. This reaction to this bit of I-thought-was-common-knowledge threw me.
As a homebrewer, I watched the prices of grain and hops explode during the mini-crisis in the USA around 2008, when retail gas went over $4/gallon. Brewing podcasts were filled with professional and amateur brewers lamenting how expensive their practice had become. All agriculture these days is fairly energy intensive, and thus sensitive to oil prices, but beer brewing especially so. Production of the base ingredient, malted barley, requires large amounts of heat; then after that, large amounts of energy to boil the brew for an hour or two. Typical “everyman” beers are also transported long distances after brewing. (By the way, have you supported your local brewpub today?)
Here’s an article from around that time explaining how dependent our economy is on oil prices.
So that line is gone from the story, replaced by something that melds better in that context. There may be the grain (pun intended?) of a future story with that line, though.