Finally: Beer sales are opened by the Church!
When the plague came to gamemaster attention, the normal price sales of BEER by the Church at 0.005 and MEAD by the Town at 0.001 were closed. This was to make an interesting learning experiment on how to act in an emergency when the thing you normally deal with and make commercial profit, suddenly becomes an instrument of life and death for the public, some of them aware of the danger and willing to pay, others either not aware or not having the means to pay even close what the others can.
This kind of challenge is very common in real world and the special trickiness lies in the signal effect on how the situation is handled. If preparation is rewarded, people prepare more in the future. If freeriding is, more of that will happen. But the actions of the different crisis managers are seldom coordinated and typically it is not possible to force a reward for preparation - different relief efforts usually help those in most plight, who sometimes even profit on the expense of those who by their own planning evaded the catastrophe.
So since BEER is cheap to produce, not miraculously healthy, but a very useful drink consumed en masse, and Church is not a commercial entity and does not need to care about gouging prices, I spent countless of hours explaining the challenge to them (yes there are many
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The result was to allocate about 1/3 of the Church beer stock as a gift to those in most need, characters who on their own means usually drink mead. Only 1/5 of all characters were in this category.
Every commoner is entitled to buy their allocation of max 400 bottles at a price of 0.010. For anyone practically considering this, the price should not be an issue so they exercised restraint and made the active players pay for the free distro to the poor (which they did not have authority to charge by GM decision).
Not all nobles are wealthy and many of them drink beer because of this, and others because they don't need an all-wine diet due to being young. Some of these are unhappy with the ban, as during an emergency, they are deprived of a product that they normally can buy, and are forced to buy 10-20 times more expensive product instead. Not all can be made happy. On the other hand, some masters are making small business by selling their excess beer to the market which normally is capped by church pricing but now opened due to the ban.
MEAD is not in my assessment even close to being as crucial as beer in the challenge, but the noble beer ban opens up some interesting ways how to tackle it. I will be making the allocation / opening the sales on behalf of the Town in a few hours.
