Wheat Costs Put Some German Brewers at a Disadvantage

(MoneyWatch)  A couple of interesting tidbits from CNBC's Eurocentric blog, which is using Germany's Oktoberfest as an excuse to examine the state of the beer industry:

It turns out that German makers of weissbier (wheat beer) are being hit hard by rising wheat prices, and competitors have an advantage thanks in part to Germany's purity laws, called "the Reinheitsgebot," which preclude brewers from using, for example, rice in their beer. This means that global brewers that aren't bound by the laws have an advantage on costs. Budweiser, for example, is one-third rice.

CNBC notes that energy costs are proving even more odious as brewers find it evermore expensive to truck their products around Europe.

Trucking in the past has been the saving grace of brewers. The few that survived prohibition in the United States did so because they had fleets of trucks that could be used for other things.