The Gazette has an article today stating that there is a price-hike going on amongst the beer brewers, particularly the smaller specialty brewers (meaning everything not Coors, Bud or Miller.) This increase is due to farmers growing corn in response to the artificially inflated demand for ethanol (created by government mandate for ethanol fuel) which has predictably caused a shortage of other crops, barley and hops in this article.
It seems that I have read about this previously... Oh yeah, on my own blog. Seems I wrote about this" over a year ago.
Way to go FedGov! Just keep ignoring economics, its worked so well for us so far.