Enjoy the citrus top-notes and graphically designed label of that craft beer you're swigging, it might be your last for some time.
No need to adjust your square-framed glasses (for which you have no prescription anyway), you read that correctly. Artisanal ale is going the way of the sabre tooth tiger and affordable housing: it's joining the endangered species list.
Such is the trendy demand for these cottage industry cold pints, farmers are warning of an imminent shortage of the aromatic hops that make them taste quite so delicious. Crops of these are fewer and they yield less, like a sort of agricultural tortured genius, so it's highly likely that small producers and faddy drinkers alike will lose out.
What's even more alarming is the prospect of prices going up because of this, especially given that these beers, with their seductive Stateside names, folksy logos and unverifiable 19th-century origins – in short, their demographic-assuring pseudo-vintage stylings – already cost upwards of £4 a bottle in some public houses already.
It's the tragic way of all fashionable things – the careful balance between popularity and ubiquity, cool and commerce, that usually ends in any self-respecting hipster giving up on whatever they've adopted earlier than the rest of us. Either any old Joe Bloggs can get hold of it, or it becomes so expensive that the middle-class cognoscenti have to cede power to rich foreigners and bankers anyway. But this type of beer has become so much part of a lifestyle that an enforced abstinence will hit the craft crowd – hard. For one thing, it wasn't long ago that they were told their beards were over. Whatever next? A biochemical plague affecting only ironic cardigans?
On a more serious note, craft beer has become a culture or hobby that anoints the drinker with the credibility of "a foodie". This isn't the sort of beer you drink to get hammered, nor are they the pints behind thrown fists, broken chairs and bleeding gums at the end of the night. No, they're part of a faux-agrarian utopia of semi-ethical nonsense, bought by people who enjoy feeling part of an elite community with the products they buy, rather than just another mass consumer drowning in price stickers and BOGOF offers.
But not many craft beers come from the field down the road or the microbrewery in Torquail's shed any more – it's a market like any other. Last year, craft company Sierra Nevada made more than $200m (£119m) in sales. UK firm BrewDog, whose website rivals even the most enthusiastic Apprentice applicant for grandiloquence and whose lagers are rapidly replacing Bulmers as the bottle of choice for Camden try-hards, boasts an "anti-business business model".
Craft beer may once have had a non-commercial feel to it – certainly these producers pale in comparison to the exporters of more mainstream straw-coloured fight juice – but that element seems to have hopped it. Even in the UK, where the scarcity is slightly less urgent, we've raced through this year's crop and are dependent on good weather for 2015's.
Blame it on the rise of "masstige"; an astroturfing of mainstream culture, a Hyacinth Bucket psyche that means people buy organic as long as it says it on the label but they don't really care whether it is or not. And that in itself is part of the ever-growing strain to distance ourselves from what we say is cheap and unhealthy, but what we really mean is poor and ignorant. To eat and drink badly these days is frowned upon by a society influenced top-down of people who can actually afford things like craft beer, yoga holidays and wood-burning stoves. The rest of us just pretend we can, and in doing so justify the ridiculous prices being charged.
Come on, no more of this. Put down your self-conscious apothecary-style drink. Read the writing on the exposed brick wall. If you still have a beard, stroke it. The really hip people are back on the John Smiths now anyway.
