This post is part of a series chronicling news coverage of rising prices in the United States. See more here.
KTVB 7 Idaho reports on a local brewery struggling to adjust to rising gas and aluminum prices
Reporter: “Fuel surcharges are showing up on every truck, the ones hauling specialty malts and imported hops in and the ones taking finished beer out”
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Citation
From a May 18, 2026, video uploaded to the website of KREM
ASPEN SHUMPERT (REPORTER): Right, and to keep those rising costs off customers, Mother Earth Brewing is looking towards more Idaho-based ingredients wherever they can. Inside Mother Earth Brewing's production facility in Nampa, they make 30,000 barrels of beer a year. But these days, every step of getting that beer from the tank to your hands is getting more expensive.
CHRIS BAKER (MOTHER EARTH BREWING): Any added pressure definitely has a negative impact on our bottom line.
SHUMPERT: Director of brewing operations Chris Baker, says U.S. tariffs on imported metals have pushed the price of a single aluminum can up 15% in just three months. Today, it sits just under 13 cents a can.
BAKER: That if we see another three to, say, six cents of increase, then we'll start to have to seriously consider pricing structures, where certain things go, and how we're gonna handle that going forward, because that will begin to drive into our margins enough to make it a little more scary.
SHUMPERT: Baker says there's 2,400 cans in one pallet, and aluminum alone is costing the brewery thousands more a truckload than it did three months ago. But he says cans aren't hitting the hardest, fuel is.
BAKER: So, that has been the number one hit that we've seen in the last little bit.
SHUMPERT: Fuel surcharges are showing up on every truck, the ones hauling specialty malts and imported hops in and the ones taking finished beer out.
BAKER: For our trucking companies, they can't absorb all that cost, so they just pass it along in fuel charges, which we end up paying throughout the year.
SHUMPERT: Mother Earth ships beer across the Western U.S. every week and occasionally to the East Coast. Even the brewery's own sprinter van running beer to its taproom in Boise is costing more to operate.
BAKER: Prices jumped almost $2 a gallon, and all of a sudden you're incurring costs that you didn't budget for and you weren't thinking about at the beginning of the year.
SHUMPERT: Baker says the grain and hops they work with are largely grown in Idaho.
BAKER: We import some hops from, like, Germany to make our German style Pilsner. Starting to see tariffs on those.
SHUMPERT: Baker says they're looking for Idaho-grown alternatives to imported ingredients.
BAKER: It is not a business to get rich doing, so we have very small margins. We have to run our business very intelligently.
SHUMPERT: For now, the brewery is absorbing the rising costs internally, doing what they can to keep them out of your wallet.
BAKER: If we continue to feel those pressures it's something that we would have to consider.
SHUMPERT: Baker says Mother Earth moved to Idaho from California in 2016 to get away from severe drought concerns, but he says this last winter is the driest one they've seen in the last ten years they've been here. He says reservoir levels at Lucky Peak and Anderson are in a good spot right now, but, Morgan, of course that could change, and so they're closely watching what water levels will be, because that could be an added stress for them coming up.