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(Our happy hour fact to amaze your drinking buddies with.)

Thieves have increasingly targeted empty kegs of beer over the past five years as the price of stainless steel scrap metal has doubled.

An 18-pound keg now fetches between $13 and $30 on the scrap market. The Beer Institute (we call it the "Happiness Institute") estimates that in 2007, approximately 300,000 kegs were stolen, leading to a loss of $50 million. For that reason, the industry group has pushed for state governments to consider new metal-theft legislation.

"It's been terribly frustrating," said Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman, who estimates about 8 percent of his company's $150 kegs were lost or stolen in the past year. "This will increase the price of beer."

Asylum encourages its readers to support legislation creating harsher penalties, possibly even capital punishment, for these most foul scavengers whose actions threaten the very existence of happy hour.

Check out the gallery of our favorite drunks below.

Our Top Ten Favorite Drunks

    10. Prime Minister, author, Nobel Prize winner, Sir Winston Churchill accomplished more on a typical hungover Sunday than most of us do during our entire lives. We can barely be bothered to go out for brunch most weekends.

    Photo FromGetty Images

    9. Though no longer a raging alkie, Slash brilliantly hid his problem under a fright wig of hair and top hat. Of course, there was his memorable obscenity-laden acceptance speech at the 1990 American Music Awards that gave James Joyce's "FinnegansWake" a run for its brilliant indecipherability.(Photo From Getty Images)

    8. Nick Nolte
    Even before his infamous mugshot, Nolte perpetually looked like he'd just come off a six-week bender. His good-time swagger is the kind that makes you want to ride a Harley hammered (well, almost).

    Photo From AP

    7. Dorothy Parker famously said that "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses." But they do go for gals who can fill glasses and then drink them under the Algonquin Roundtable, and Ms. Parker could down a vodka gimlet faster than you can say "the dry wit of Robert Benchley." (Photo From Getty Images)

    6. It's hard to listen to Janis Joplin sing without feeling your liver fill to the brim with Southern Comfort. (The phrase "booze-soaked vocals" was practically invented for her.) She makes blottoed sound worldly wise and makes Amy Winehouse seem like a rank amateur. (Photo from Getty Images)

    5. Andy Capp
    Everyone's favorite comic strip rummy has been tossing back pints and threatening his long-suffering wife Flo with violence since 1957. Seriously, isn't it time that Social Services took a long, hard look at that marriage?

    4. Ernest Hemingway
    The prototypical hard-drinking author, Papa Hemingway has given generations of mediocre writers an excuse to wail into their beers about their unpublished masterpieces. Still, as fine an author as he was, we figure his fondness for creepy, multi-toed cats must have had something to do with large quantities of alcohol. (Photo From AP)

    3. Unlike today's repentant rehabbers, Dylan Thomas reveled in the image of the drunken poet. Although he wasn't an alcoholic, be rest assured he wasn't an alcoholic. As he once said: "An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do." Ah, the bard athis finest. (Photo from Getty Images)

    2. If you're a fan of "Futurama," you know Bender's name doesn't just refer to his function as a robot who bends things: Liquor is his life's blood. Now if only he'd get toasted and punch out that wussy robot from "Lost In Space."

    1. Keith Richards
    is arguably the most-inspiring drunk of our time. He's such a notorious and charismatic drunk, Johnny Depp based Jack Sparrow on him and then coerced Richards to play his drunken, pirate father in the third "Pirates" film. Yet that character pales in comparison to Richards, who got so hammered he took a tumble out of a coconut tree, and lived to rock on! (Getty Images)