Belarusians will be left with 10 kinds of imported beer

The amount of imported beer will sharply drop in Belarus.

They decided to take the imported hops drink off the shelves for the IIHF World Championship. But apart from that as of 1 May it is only possible to bring imported beers into the country after having received a license. What is going on with beer now? Having visited several supermarkets, I saw only a couple shelves with imported beers. There is practically no choice. In order to find a certain kind of beer, one will have to go around several shops, Komsomolskaya Pravda in Belarus reports.

- There is nothing at the storehouses anymore. All that you see on the shelves are the remainders, - shares a representative of one of Belarus’ large beer importers.

- We have already obtained five licenses, - they told at one of the beer-importing companies. – It means that we can now import five kinds of beer in Belarus for selling. Documents are being prepared for other kinds of beers now. We hope, we will manage to keep the whole product line.

At another beer-importing company, which specializes in importing Ukrainians beers, they are not so optimistic.

- Now all the producers of Ukrainian beers are trying to reach agreements with BelStateFoodProm, but have not yet succeeded. Ukrainian beers will be there, we just need to wait, - they say.

Last week at the Ministry of Trade they said that nine licenses had been issued, the importers say that now it may be the matter of roughly ten permits.

By the way, recently a rumor came around that officials wanted to keep no more than 10% of imported beers on the shelves, saying that during the World Championship everyone bought the Belarusian ones and nothing bad happened. However, there is still no official confirmation to such a novelty yet.