Wheat plays a very small part in the brewing process for AB.  The rising beer prices are due to barley shortages (I guess you could draw the similarity there) and very heavily due to the hop shortage.  

Keep in mind mind the big brewers use mostly rice in their beers and have long-term contracts with suppliers preventing shortages from impacting prices too much.  

This was a poorly researched article.

Why are we still paying farmers not to grow crops?

How much wheat does the US produce annually?  How much of it is exported?  How much is sold versus given freely?

The current MAJOR beer ingredients shortage involves mainly hops and malted barley, not wheat (which sees limited use mainly in speciality Weiss beers).  In the case of Bud they also apparently use lots of corn and rice, so maybe they will have the least problem of all brewers.  Watch for many more rye beers appearing from U.S. craft brewers as well.

I needed to drink less beer anyways.

This is what we get when we refuse to drill for oil and set aside thousands of acres of productive farmland for CRP...and those are just US policies.

Wake up America the West is facing a complete shutdown of farming in our next drought cycle. Cities will get all the available water farms will dry up. We need major water projects i.e. more off stream storage, canals around sensitve delta's and more and bigger dams. Bio has driven the cost of fertilizer's and nutriiants double and in some cases four times. The high cost of corn has bankrupted the states (CA) first major bio plant within it's first year of operation. There will be no little farmer within five years, it is all about economics today. This is not 1933 with a few chickens in the the back yard, a milk cow, and a garden, city folks today will riot if their fav brown bag market has empty shelves, they have no food production skills or land to produce for a family on. There has to become a way to just start building sure there will be some mistakes but look at the Auburn Dam study started in the mid 1940's funded over and over construction even started million's of dollars way more than the cost spent and no dam BUT 1000-1500 people a year do enjoy great rive rafting for a two month period hmmmm 300,000,000 Americans waiting in bread lines ya ya kinda makes sence rafting food rafting food I'll get it just give me time.

Why don't we just trade oil for wheat and keep all the prices down so that average

person can afforded to live.

Seems like we have a lot of good farm land here in America.  Why cant we grow more wheat here?  Come on now.  American products deserve American grown and produced ingredients.  Also, why import when when we could just a easily export.

John,

Although both points are valid. Neither of these are actually affecting the price of wheat and thus our grocery prices.  The real culprit are the hedge funds that have poured into the commodity markets due to a suffering wall street.  These hedge funds are purely speculating in the commodity markets i.e. CBOT, MGE, KCBOT and are driving the "bubble" of wheat prices.  These prices have nearly tripled in the last year because of the speculative buyers.  These hedge funds along with droughts in Australia and South America and a more refined diet by much of the world i.e. India, China and Southeast Asia are the true drivers in higher commodity prices.  Americans are blindly blaming ethanol which does deserve a piece of the blame but not the whole burden.  The U.S. is the largest supplier of wheat into the world market followed by Canada.  If this wheat stays in the U.S. instead of flooding into the world market due to droughts elsewhere than the wheat prices will begin to return to historic levels.