An ice-cold craft beer has become part of the uniform for self-respecting hipsters from Brooklyn in New York to the London borough of Hackney. Now the craze for the microbrews made by small independent brewers has led to a scramble for hops, the key ingredient used to add flavour and bitterness. In the US, where the movement was born, the $14bn craft beer industry has seen annual double-digit production growth over the past few years. This has doubled the price of the specialist aroma and flavour hops favoured by craft brewers to about $7 to $10 a pound over the past five years – the highest since 2007-08 when the market was hit by a severe drought.

Marvin Joseph | The Washington Post | Getty Images

Craft beers use between four to 10 times more hops than the average lager produced by multinational beer companies and are often described as "hop bombs". "I've been buying hops for 30 years. It's more challenging now than just about any time in my career," says Steve Dresler, brewmaster at California-based Sierra Nevada, a leading craft brewer started by homebrewers in the late 1970s. More from the Financial Times:

Salmon price heads for luxury territory

Rubber price fall reflects supply fears

Soyabeans slip on South American harvest Appetite for new beers pushed the total number of US craft breweries to 2,768 last year, a 15 per cent jump on 2012. Their brews now account for almost 8 per cent of the total US beer market. The popularity of their craft beers has spread to the UK, continental Europe and Japan, as well as emerging markets, and there is increasingly intense competition for hop crops around the world. "[Craft brewing] is like a pandemic that's spreading everywhere. Even China has 1,000 craft brewers," says Alex Barth of the Barth-Haas Group, a leading hop trader headquartered in Germany.