After reading many posts and other stuff on line about corny's going extinct, I wonder if it is true. Recently a shop near my house that deals in volumes of kegs raised their prices to match all of the LHBS after getting a shipment, stating that they were going to get harder to find, but I see mountains of them at all of the LHBS, on line, and on craigslist. And, if I lived in Seattle, I could get them from Tom for $25.....
I understand the beverage makers are not using them anymore, or retiring them, but shouldn't that just make them more available to the homebrew trade at nearly the scrap metal value? Lastly, is it disingenuous to say that they are scarce when you can also buy them new (at 3 times the price, however)? I posit that they someday might become scarce, but they are nowhere near at this point, and treating them as rare precious metal and the price inflations are just plain wrong. I also understand that once upon a time, you could get them for practically nothing, requiring nothing more than a little elbow grease.
On another note, I was at a local craft brewer and noticed that they have elected to use plastic kegs (I don't know what types of plastic)....does this mean that stainless kegs will also go away altogether eventually? I am not worried, as how many years would it take to replace the quadzillion kegs in circulation?
Also, as canning becomes more prevalent in craft beer, will the opinion of cans improve, and will that eventually mean the end of glass bottles? I am surprised this hasn't happened already in BMC world (it would be so much cheaper to only deal with one packaging line). They even have cans shaped like bottles. Again, hard to worry about these things....it would take years to make them rare.
Kind of like the gasoline powered automobile....if they stopped making them tomorrow (which they won't), how many years would it be before you couldn't find a gas station? In fact, the reason alternative fuel vehicles are a hard sell is that there are a million gas stations that would need to convert, and they wouldn't convert until there is a majority of vehicles to serve, and there won't be a majority of vehicles to serve until there are reliable numbers (at reliable intervals) of places to fuel them. Electric vehicles have the only real chance because you can charge them at home overnight breaking the status quo cycle somewhat.
Topic: Going extinct? (Read 3990 times)
