beer shortage in belgium?

It sounds like hell is freezing over isn’t it, but this one is actually quite funny imho (dutch news article).
You see, once upon a time there was this Belgian brewery called Interbrew which was basically owning the Belgian beer market and decided they wanted to grow even bigger.

After joining forces with a Brazilian company and changing the name to InBev they, just like every other international corporation, decided they wanted to make ever more money. So cutbacks where in order, figures where compared, and decisions where made by pointy haired bosses based on pretty looking Excel sheets with colorful graphs.

One of those decisions was to move production of a world renowned white beer Hoegaarden from the place where it got it’s name from, to Jupile, located a good 100 km further. Employees and beer lovers protested the move, as they feared the quality of the beer would suffer from the move. But since money is everything for the large corporations, these pleads where ignored and the original brewery was largely taken down and moved to Jupile.

Now it turns out they can’t brew the beer properly in Jupile. They don’t want to admit it yet and came up with the rather silly excuse that they have a packaging problem. It’s more likely that they fail to brew the Hoegaarden beer and get it’s unique fruity flavour because one of the major components in the region of Jupile is significantly different that it was in the original brewery. The water used to brew the beer.

This typical pointy haired boss decision, ignoring the advise from folks down on the floor has now killed one of their most popular beers.

Suits you sir I’d say. I guess they forgot to put that in their Excel sheets didn’t they?