As we mentioned last month, craft beer produced by small local breweries is one of the new industry trends entrepreneurs are taking advantage of. But with a shortage of hops and price increases for other ingredients, beer prices are rising worldwide, according to an AOL News article.

Sales for craft beers rose 31 percent over the past three years, giving hope to an industry that has been losing sales to wine and cocktails. But harvests of hops in the U.S. were down this year likely due to excessive heat in the western states, while drought and other weather problems have affected crops around the world. In addition, rising prices for barley, wheat and production materials are said to have an additional impact on small breweries that are unable to negotiate prices for raw materials as successfully as their larger counterparts. As a result, some craft brewers are having to alter their recipes or raise their prices to make up for the shortages and price spikes.

"Brewers are trying to take pricing up, but it's hard when beer is pretty sensitive to pricing per volume--and when drinkers are leaving beer to go to wine and spirits," Harry Schuhmacher, editor of Beer Business Daily, said in the article.

However, Schuhmacher adds that small breweries have more leeway in raising prices without losing consumers than the bigger companies.

We previously blogged about survey results revealing the most annoying kinds of co-workers. What about other irksome office habits that the rest of us might be committing unknowingly?

A survey of over 2,000 Americans by market researcher Harris Interactive named gossip as the most irritating office pet peeve. Also ranked among the top offenders were messy communal spaces; loud noises or conversations; overwhelming smells; and poor time usage, such as making personal phone calls or surfing the web during work. As far as e-mail habits, respondents also listed unnecessary usage of “reply all” or “blind copy” features as high annoyances.

Yet workers seem to be less confident about voicing some of their grievances in person. While 42 percent of respondents said they would confront a co-worker about noise, only 34 percent would complain about gossip and 25 percent about e-mail frustrations.

The October 2007 SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard, an economic indicator that tracks the health of U.S. small businesses, reported that hiring and salaries grew in the small-business economy last month but entrepreneurs' optimism declined.

Only 64.2 percent of small-business owners surveyed by SurePayroll said they were optimistic about the economy, down from 78.3 percent in September.

Despite lower optimism, hiring and salaries both increased in October. The SurePayroll Hiring Index ended the month at 10,822, a 35-point increase (0.32 percent) from September. The SurePayroll Pay Index was 1,056 at the end of October, up three points (0.28 percent) from the end of September. Year to date, small-business hiring is up 3.6 percent, and small-business salaries have increased 3.7 percent.

The SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard is based on payroll records of over 18,000 companies who use SurePayroll's payroll service. For more details on SurePayroll's analysis, visit www.surepayroll.com/scorecard.