Four Years Ago the World Stopped

Post Updated below.

The week of March 9, 2020 broke our brains. Just days before, this novel coronavirus thing was something that afflicted China and Italy—the US was slow to the party and the number of cases didn’t seem that bad. As recently as the previous Tuesday, I was in pure theoretical mode, not yet absorbing what was happening:

(March 3, 2020) There are currently only a hundred reported cases, and in a country of 325 million, that’s not bad. But if that figure is artificially low—and it certainly is—it could balloon in coming days. The first death in China happened nearly two months ago. How many American retailers can go two months with no real business? Three? Four? This is especially bad for smaller breweries, many of which depend on retail outlets for a big part of their business. Not to get alarmist, but this could be bad.

Monday the 9th started with a huge drop in the stock market. By midweek, the NCAA canceled March Madness and professional sports leagues started canceling their entire seasons. The WHO declared Covid a pandemic. Celebrities caught the virus. President Trump was busy minimizing the threat—he was in the middle of a re-election campaign—and honestly so were most of the people I knew. Hell I was trying to minimize it. On social media, I was rallying people to get to the empty pubs and help local breweries out—advice I followed on the night of Friday, March 13. When I think back, that’s the date I use to mark the start of Covid. The next day I woke up with what turned out to be a cold, but I was worried I’d just infected everyone at the bar I was “saving.”

Nothing in our living memory could prepare us for what was to come, and human brains aren’t wired to understand events as huge and transformational as what we confronted.

I think in many ways we never really did understand it. That was the case for the last great pandemic that raced across the planet a century earlier. It was so large and diffuse, lacking any knowable villain, that in its aftermath people just moved on. Scholars started unearthing the written record and they were shocked to find both how profoundly it changed society—and how little people ever discussed it. Here we are, four years later, in a similar situation. I am convinced we are still experiencing a trauma that has changed the trajectory of our lives collectively and individually. Yet that trauma itself prevents us from looking too closely at all the pandemic’s lingering effects. We’re moving on, too, with wounds not fully healed.

This is a blog about beer, so let me use this small part of society to illustrate what I mean. This list is almost certainly not complete, so use the comments to fill out the record. (These may not be applicable outside the U.S.)

The multi-year shift to packaged beer sparked a wholesale conversion to cans from bottles, which are nearly extinct now.
Drinking habits changed, and draft remains well below its 2019 baseline. Consumption may be down overall.
Younger drinkers who never had the party-hearty experiences of early generations may never fully embrace alcohol.
Delayed by government intervention, far fewer breweries closed than expected, but even four years on, Covid closures continue.
Thanks to service industry staff getting tagged “essential workers,” many left the industry. That sparked a sharp wage spike that was long overdue, but it did impact breweries already struggling with dropping sales.
The shift to remote work had impacts on breweries located in downtowns, which saw traffic drop, and neighborhoods, which saw it rise.
In many parts of the US, customers never fully returned to pub-going at 2019 levels. For breweries who relied on the higher per-pint revenue those sales generated, this has been a hard way to follow up the pandemic.

And that’s just the disruption in beer. Every part of life was touched by Covid—including, most importantly, the millions who died from the virus. The thing I feel most sharply is the loss of trust we feel in our institutions and each other. The isolation and dislocation Covid caused didn’t make us more rely on each other more (at least at a societal level), it made us feel like nothing was truly safe. We’re left with lingering mistrust of one another. That this anniversary lands during an election year, like 2020, underscores the point.

One of the best things to appear on this site were the reflections of brewers going through the pandemic in real time, offering their thoughts, reactions, strategies, and emotions—the Coronavirus Diaries. If you would like to revisit the first 15 months of the pandemic, you can start the series here. I bundled up those posts in a book with a bit more added context as well. It’s a strange artifact, one I doubt any of us have the stomach to revisit yet—but it’s there if you would like a copy to look at in, I don’t know, five years?

Take a moment to reflect on this week four years ago, to measure the distance we’ve come. I think it’s important not to look past it. And be well, my friends—

Update (3/14/24). After this went up, Tyler Brown contacted me with a remarkable coda to this era. The owner of Barley Brown’s brewpub, he and his brother also own a local restaurant.

“We own a restaurant in Baker City that we operated for 7 days a week 16 hours a day for 32 years straight. We shut it down on 3/14/2020. It still remains closed.

“I was walking around in it a couple days ago, and noticed that the newspaper stand still has the newspapers that were delivered the day we closed.”

They still own the place and do plan to open it. Staffing has been the main challenge—the unemployment rate has been at or near an all-time low since Covid ended.