America Could Face A Beer Shortage Due To Mississippi Underground Volcano Gas Leak

This news will make you drink.

According to scientific experts, the United States is experiencing a CO2 shortage due to contamination that is showing up in CO2 being sourced from an extinct underground volcano in Mississippi.

No, I haven't been drinking. This isn't #fakenews.

The Jackson Dome, which sits 2,900 feet beneath Jackson, Mississippi, has provided CO2 to the restaurant and beer industries going all the way back to 1977, but this summer, the supply was contaminated by raw gas which means the CO2 is useless and has led to a shortage of the gas that is critical to the brewing industry.

You know where this is going: the supply chain is being wrecked and prices have jumped as a result.

"We've been running delivery to delivery for the past few weeks, and we are certainly concerned about the supply," Ronn Friedlander, co-founder of Aeronaut Brewing, told Axios.

"We have to figure out some way to continue to source CO2 and, for now, we're actually just staying ahead of it, but it's certainly a big concern for us," Friedlander added during an interview with FOX News.

In July, Night Shift Brewing in Boston announced its CO2 supply was being cut "for the foreseeable future, possibly more than a year until we get more."

Nick Purdy, co-founder and president of Wild Heaven Beer in Atlanta says so far his company has been spared by the CO2 shortage, but there are still precautions being taken.

The Jackson Volcano as interpreted by an artist who might've been drinking / WAPT

"If the rail strike had happened, it would have quickly become a problem and not just for us," Purdy told OutKick. "There’s almost no major process (brewing, cleaning, packaging) that doesn’t require CO2. Our head brewer has rewritten our standard operating procedures in the past two weeks designed to reduce our usage going forward without any compromise in quality."

Could prices for a pint go up? It's 2022, of course, you should expect it. Friedlander also noted that there could be "slight reductions" in beer availability due to this CO2 issue.

And CO2 isn't the only issue facing the beer industry. Inflation has the price of aluminum cans up 20%; malt is up 30%; shipping is up 50%.

Meanwhile, inflation as a whole reached a 40-year high in June.

Excuse me while I go pound triple IPAs before these things go extinct.