Three Years Later, an Altered World
People mark the exact date slightly differently, but for me, the novel coronavirus pandemic started on March 13, 2020–three years ago today. That was a Friday on week in which the NBA canceled its season, the NCAA canceled March madness, and the stock market was beginning what would become a shocking collapse. In Oregon, Governor Kate Brown shut down the schools that day, and the following Monday, she would shut down bars and restaurants on the way to complete closure.
The CDC, which had its hits and misses, was already projecting by March 13 that that the virus would ultimately infect 160-214 million in the US, killing 200,000 to 1.7 million of us. (At the time, only fifty people had died and just 2,100 were infected.) I don’t actually remember this warning, no doubt because my brain couldn’t go from, “Hey, something seems to be happening in China and Italy” to “We are about to shut everting in the country down for six months.”These numbers seemed ridiculous. The idea that a coronavirus would shut down the country for months—never mind years—was certainly not a place my mind could go.
Well, here it is three years later and Covid has become endemic—a persistent coronavirus we can manage but not eliminate, like the cold and flu. We’ll never know how many people caught the virus—with home tests, a large number of cases are never reported—but it’s well over the CDC’s worst-case scenario. Even with a miraculously quick vaccine, 1.15 million have died—the high end of the CDC’s prediction. Still, hundreds of people are dying each day. We accommodate ourselves to these stats because, I mean at some point you just gotta get on with your life. It becomes a risk we endure. And that changed reality, where life goes on even as 300 people die each day, is symptomatic of vast, society-wide changes that have substantially changed the way we live in America. It has changed everything from well-documented situations like working from home to small examples like how people aren’t coloring their hair as much anymore now that they’re not in the office. And while we tend to talk about it in only a topline fashion—malt beverages are down nationally—it has affected beer in large and small ways that would have been, absent a disruption as profound as the pandemic, unthinkable at the start of this new decade.
During the first roughly year and a half, I posted reports from breweries that documented the way Covid impacted their businesses (and themselves). You can read those dispatches in a book I published (or start reading individual entries here). But that was just the active phase, the putting-out-fires phase. What has emerged in the early months of 2023 is that the aftermath is nearly as stark. To mark this grim anniversary, I’m going to consider those unexpected changes as we add another page to this grim historical record.
Retreating From Public Life
A funny thing happened when people were forced to spend the better part of two years isolating at home. Not only did they develop new strategies to manage life in a bubble, but they began to accept that bubble as an normal state of being. We adapted by meeting virtually. Zoom existed before Covid, but almost no one had ever used it until March 2020. We had begun doing some shopping online, but now it’s hard to get down a neighborhood street without having to dodge an Amazon truck. People are still even ordering beer for home delivery—something the state of Oregon didn’t even allow in February 2020.
Those shifts have had profound effects on our cities. Downtowns, once hubs for office work, emptied out and many never really refilled. That meant workers quit pouring into commercial districts, so restaurants and dry cleaners and shops started closing. And pubs. One of the landmark failures in Portland was Bailey’s Taproom, the first modern beer bar. Rogue closed their Pearl taproom, and other breweries downtown—Von Ebert, 10 Barrel, Deschutes—have a fraction of their pre-Covid traffic. About half as many people visit downtown Portland now as they did in 2019, and there’s no reason to think many will be coming back anytime soon.
It goes beyond parts of the city. Entire activities we once enjoyed are withering. We don’t go out to movies anymore; we stream content on our devices. We don’t go to concerts as much anymore; we stream music on our phones. And, highly relevant to the beer world, we just don’t go out to drink as much anymore.
I’ve been shocked at how much traffic is down in my favorite pubs, and how quickly they close each night. Over the weekend, I took to Twitter to confirm or disprove my impressions about pub-going, and the results were shocking. I asked people how often they were going to the pubs compared to 2019. These polls aren’t scientific, but in this case that makes the results all the more pointed: I wasn’t asking regular people, I was quizzing the most avid beer fans in the US.
I got a nice response—five hundred folks. Of those, just more than a third are going to the pub as often as they once did (30%) or going more often (7%). Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they were going less often, and a shocking 35% were going “far less often.”
For breweries, that has huge consequences. By most accounts, taprooms are still profitable (though maybe not in downtown cores), but draft volumes are down substantially across the board. That means lowered revenues as they are forced to send their cans to grocery stores instead. It means a narrower pipeline to stores, which are simultaneously cutting shelf space for beer, and a greater reliance on low-margin packaged beer. Breweries have had to completely re-think their business plans. There’s much more focus on flagship lines that compete for shelf space, and a lot less experimentation—the kind of stuff people used to sample on draft.
As all major events do (war, famine, government instability, etc), it’s already changing the kinds of beer we drink as well. Two of the bigger trends in beer right now are mirror opposites. On the one hand, breweries are very excited about non-alcoholic beer. (The evidence that drinkers are embracing it is less robust, but it’s still worth watching.) On the other hand, massive, 9% double IPAs are skyrocketing in popularity. It seems that both trends are the consequence of drinking at home. Since people aren’t drinking together and discussing interesting new flavors or trends, they’re drinking at home. Inflation has caused a price spike, so they’re cost-conscious. As a result, they’re going for “value”—booze for the buck. Voodoo Ranger, Big Ballard, Big Little Thing—these are the growth areas.
The Other Changes in Beer
The big changes—where in the city we drink, how often we go out, what we drink—are the headliners. But I’ve noticed other interesting, small-scale changes as well.
Let’s start with the economy. Covid scrambled employment in unexpected ways. At the outset of the pandemic, I thought we were going to be plunged into a worldwide depression as uneployment skyrocketed. Because the government took care of workers, however, they used their time off to re-evaluate their situations. Many discovered they didn’t like working for poor wages and started demanding more money, benefits, and control over scheduling. People streamed out of hospitality because of the abusive work environments, realizing they weren’t paid enough to suffer customer and employer abuse. That has left pubs and restaurants perennial short staffed, leading to structural changes like less and/or more efficient table service. It’s common for pubs to use services like ToastTab or to cash customers out at their table, or to have customers order at the bar. Servers now routinely bring handheld scanners to tables to cash people out (catching up, finally, with Europe), limiting the back-and-forth to the bar. I suspect we’ll see more auto-serve in the future as well. None of this is hugely disruptive, but it took Covid to happen.
It’s affecting adjacent industries as well, and I have some insight into one in particular. I’ve been blogging since 2007, and using social media to discuss beer since 2008. At no time in that decade and a half have I seen less interest or enthusiasm in beer. We are social beings, and a big part of the reason we get into beer is because we drink together and discuss our experiences. Part of the mood of this moment is a sense of separation from other people, and I feel that in the way folks discuss beer online.
Finally, here’s a strange little development I didn’t see coming. The shutdowns didn’t entirely eliminate our desire to get out of the house. Vacation travel is exploding. We see some of the consequences in that trend spilling over into beer. Even when they’re not on a beach, people want to feel like they are. The only unalloyed positive trend in beer is imports, almost exclusively Mexican imports. AB InBev’s craft strategy has mostly been a wash except for one product, their Kona Big Wave, which is about to become a million-barrel beer.
This phenomenon is happening in the UK, too. One of the hottest new beers is Madrí—which looks and tastes like a crisp Spanish lager filled with the sunshine of Valencia. But it was actually an invention of Molson Coors, brewed in Burton. People hunger for that sunshine, though, so having a glassful in a pub on a dreary day is like going on a tiny vacation.
This is a long post already, and it doesn’t catalogue all the ways the beer world has changed. Feel free to weigh in with your own observations. Part of the effect is that it doesn’t play out the same everywhere.
I’ll leave you with this. We’ve managed to get through the pandemic. It was so painful that we don’t much like to even talk about it. (That’s exactly what happened after the flu pandemic a hundred years ago.) It’s worth stopping once a year to look back, though, and look at what has changed. This will end up being a signature event in our lives, even if we want to forget it as soon as possible. So do look back, remind yourself of what we’ve been through, and for god’s sake get to a pub from time to time! 🙂