Time to stock up

I was catching up on some beer related reading tonight, and found a somewhat unnerving juxtaposition. I clicked on the most recent entry in the Beer Diary blog and found that the world was about to end. The brewing world, anyhow:

Now, I don't harbor a lot of American dreams, just the right to brew my own beer and I'm getting this horrific feeling that the economy may impede my efforts to have my dream and drink it too. Every day I listen to the news of the economy and my mind jumps from the current fiscal meltdown to the inevitable related consequences which then leads me to fear this will end up limiting my access to homebrewing.

Mark goes on to talk about a world where the economy falls so completely apart that he's reduced to living in his van and brewing over a fire fueled by his own feces. OK, maybe I exaggerate a bit, but only a bit. But hey, the pioneers burned buffalo chips when nothing else was available, so who knows?

I sort of wrote this off as unwarranted rambling, but then I went to visit my friends at Northern Brewer, where I find a similar thread:

Now comes the looming specter of the global economy ... shortages in the worldwide barley crop. A viciously scorching Siberian summer drove wheat prices to historic highs. And, now the hop harvest pits the incoming crop's lethargic yield, against the unwavering demand for more citrusy IPAs and amped-up pale ales.

You know, if one person, just one person says it I may think he's really sick and won't listen to him. And if two people, two people do it, well you know how the song goes. Remember the hop shortage of '09? This will probably prompt me to pre-order some hop rhizomes. It's that time of year. That way, I'll at least have something to barter when the beer shortage comes.