A Year to Mourn, A Year to Remember

Publications often spend the last week of the year highlighting their best or most-trafficked posts—including this one. Yet 2020 was no typical year, and while I’ll include links to Beervana’s most popular stories at the end of this post, I thought I’d take a different approach this December, surveying those that most directly commented on the year’s turbulent events. I know everyone is dying to leave 2020 behind, to forget its traumas and tragedies, allowing themselves to look forward with a glimmer of hope. Despite the pain, however, much about 2020 should be remembered. We may be too near events to extract their lessons, but the mere act of remembrance reminds us of what we’ve seen. With that in mind, here’s my very 2020 list.

Coronavirus Strikes

We really had no idea what was coming. The state had its first case on Feb 29, but it still seemed like a distant threat. On March 3rd I speculated that a brief interruption in business, while bad for pubs, might be good for supermarket sales of beer. Even though Oregon had its first fatality on March 15, a day later I was still arguing that we should be visiting breweries to keep them afloat. Within hours, a new reality finally dawned as the governor shut the state down, and within days and I had initiated a series called the Coronavirus Diaries, with reflections from breweries and cideries. These posts stand as an incredible document of how one industry addressed the challenges of the pandemic. They represent some of the most important words posted anywhere on the site. Of course, the series isn’t over; as we ride into the new year with 350,000 Americans dead, months remain before anything like normalcy returns.

 
 

Americans Demand Racial Justice

On May 25th, three police officers murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis. The officers were so calm in their certainty that it was a normal day at work that they didn’t even bother to stop observers filming the scene. America exploded. For months, protestors marched in cities around the country, demanding accountability and change. Nowhere were those protests more active than in Portland, which became a national Rorschach test. At home, residents could not recognize their city in the reporting, nor could protesters understand how their demands were anything but reasonable in a democracy that had for so long practiced the kind of white supremacy Floyd’s death exemplified. I wrote about it in real time, and cidermaker Nat West, a victim of police brutality at one protest, offered a call to action for an industry.

Local Tragedies

Amid the larger currents, we had our own additional disasters. For once, Oregon seemed likely to avoid serious wildfires in 2020. A late, wet spring and a moderate summer had kept the number of fires to the lowest in years. A freak windstorm arrived on Labor Day, however, acting as a bellows that fanned dozens of small fires into an inferno that killed 11 people and torched a million acres. The air turned brown and became toxic to breathe—yet another emergency that forced us to huddle inside our homes. I wrote about how unsettling it was for people to see the ancient firs and cedars they regard as sacred atomized and sent into the skies. A month later, we learned that a fixture of the Oregon brewing scene and an unyielding champion of cask ales had died, unsettling us further. No doubt tragedies like these rocked communities everywhere, landing on people already raw and lacking resilience.

An Inconclusive Election

Moods are hard to capture, especially from the distance of time. When we look back on this year, those who didn’t live through it will never grasp how ugly the mood felt as the presidential election approached. The news became poisonous, and many of us shrank from our radios and mobile notifications. The mood was like the smoke that stung our eyes two months earlier—a thick, toxic substance that troubled even our sleep. I didn’t write about it much, of course, but did feel it was important to comment on what was the overwhelming experience for most of us.

Most popular posts

Finally, and briefly, the posts that received the most traffic in 2020. This is a beer site, so it’s hardly surprising that most of the posts you liked best focused on malty substances. And understandable: in 2020, we needed a break from the grind. One note, to clarify the list, I left the Portland’s Best Breweries posts off here (both 2019 and 2020 were in the top ten.)

  1. I HAVE A MINOR COMPLAINT: Bud Light Seltzer Makes No Sense (Jan 10). (This is what happens when your snarky post becomes the number one hit on Google search terms for “Bud Light Seltzer” for the first three months of the rollout. I’m sure ABI loves me.)

  2. Five Breweries Every Beer Fan Should Visit (Feb 25).

  3. “Juicy” and “Hazy” — The Vague New Terms at the Center of Beer (April 9).

  4. A Whole Lotta New Hop Varieties (Jan 21)

  5. There’s More to Italian Pilsners Than Dry-Hopping (May 26).

  6. The Keys to Kveik (Nov 9).

  7. The Making of a Classic: Pilsner Urquell (May 20).

  8. Where is Tony Magee? (Feb 28).

  9. Dry January (Jan 6).

  10. The Great Notion Conundrum (Jan 23).

That’s an inexhaustive list, and you’re welcome to visit my archives if you’re hankering for more. Now, onto 2021.

Jeff Alworth10 Comments