It's Not Rain, It's Next Years Beer...

You must have noticed it's been a bit wet in parts of late - the recent footage of flooding in Sheffield was, err, well, something else. Indeed we would like to extend our best wishes to the Kelham Island Brewery (and others of course, plus the pubs) who were quite heavily affected, indeed washed out entirely. May they all be back in full operation soon, though I suspect many already are.

Of course up here on the hill, with chalk soil, flooding really isn't a big worry - after all, by the time we get flooded, most of our customers will be several fathoms under water - so we have brushed the rain off as just future beer (after all, it does top up the aquifers tapped by our borehole). Trouble is, if it doesn't stop soon, and by stop I mean get warm & dry for a week or three, then this years barley harvest will be in trouble, which means malting barley will go up in price, and possibly suffer a degree of scarcity - and that is not what we want.

On the other side though, I suspect just three dry days will result in hose pipe bans across the country. You can't win, can you. Maybe someone should build a few reservoirs to trap the flood waters - but no, that would mean spending money, and we can't do that. So we'll just carry on building on the flood plains, and constructing local flood relief schemes that just speed the waters on to someone else instead.

Don't you just love joined-up thinking and long term planning.