Our "Plague Year" Five Years On
Five years ago today—by my reckoning, anyway—a “novel coronavirus” changed our lives. (Here’s a quick timeline of that week if you’d like to select a different start point.) As late as March, what—8th? 9th?—we still clung to the idea that the storm would blow over and miss us. By the 13th it was clear we were going to get hit, though, as major institutions starting shutting down en masse. In that moment, and for years afterward, I am struck by how fundamentally we misunderstood the nature of the crisis. What we took to be an acute emergency was, in fact, a chronic problem with an acute phase—one that we’d never ultimately conquer or escape.
At its outset, we couldn’t imagine a global pandemic lasting even a few months. Our experience was so heavily shaded by the sense that it was a passing crisis that we kept waiting for it to end: once we figure out what we’re dealing with; once the initial wave burns out; once we get the vaccine. Our coping mechanism was to get through Covid, not come to terms with it. We treated the pandemic like a really bad flu; turns out It was more like cancer or AIDS.
Five years later, it’s still happening. Hundreds of people are still dying every week in the U.S. and presumably will be for years or decades to come. Five years ago, those numbers terrified us, made us want to fix things—the response of the mind in acute crisis. Now, whether we realize it or not, we have come to accept it as a chronic problem. Covid is part of our yearly calendar, worsening in the winter, relaxing in the summer. Hey, did the Blazers win last night?
Five years ago, I ran a series on the blog called the Coronavirus Diaries, in which some generous folks in the industry wrote about how they were trying to keep their breweries afloat. I reached back out to them for this anniversary—for one more round of reflection. I hope to have some of their thoughts for you next week. Using beer as a way of refracting the firehose of information turned out to be quite helpful in processing the realities of Covid, which seemed so pervasive and amorphous at the time, too big to really grasp in toto. Grounding it in the specific experiences of business owners, those who could precisely measure what had changed, was perhaps the most valuable content that has ever appeared on this site. (Those posts were gathered into a physical book if you would like a copy.) Looking back from the distance of five years may also be a fruitful exercise—because, if anything, its effects are more amorphous than ever.
Things are tough in the beer world right now. They’re tough in the world world, too. The question is: how much, if anything, is a result of the pandemic and its aftershocks? At a granular level, causality isn’t always direct. The Russian invasion of Ukraine sent barley and energy prices up, for example, and the world’s accommodations to the war may have scrambled these markets permanently. But in a larger sense, I think a huge amount of beer’s troubles can be laid at Covid’s feet. Consider the following effects.
1. Social Isolation
Nearly every measure of human health, physical and mental, goes back to human connection. When we have meaningful social ties to family, friends, and our communities, our minds and bodies are healthy; when they break down, we get sick and depressed. The pandemic isolated us and broke our routine social habits, but more than that, it caused us to regard each other with suspicion. Humans are tribal by nature, and we became more so during Covid. Political polarization, political tribalization, really, has become a universal, transcending cultures as diverse as the U.S., India, France, and Hungary.
When we visit half-empty pubs that were buzzing before Covid, we see the aftershocks of this dynamic. It is not a universal. Blue states, where shutdowns were more common and durable, seem to be in worse shape. In the middle of the pandemic, that seemed like the smart move—those shutdowns resulted in far lower infection and death rates than in red states. But there may have been hidden costs to those policies. (I personally offer blanket immunity to any public officials who made decisions in good faith with limited info—they were given impossible choices.) Americans hate to think about public policy, but it directly shapes the way we live.
Finally, this isolation affected the way we interact with information. Covid made us all far more skeptical about social media. We saw how it is an accelerant for everything, including misinformation and toxic trolling. But it also drove us into separate spheres of information, with little crossover. Because of Covid, we are more separate socially, politically, religiously, and informationally. This played out in the beer world in the great Bud Light disaster of 2023, the rise of conservative beer brands, and a more open embrace of politics by smaller breweries. We have separated ourselves out, and that very much includes our taproom and bar choices.
2. Scrambled Geography
Prior to Covid, about 6% of Americans worked remotely. For a brief period, it shot up over 50%, and it has settled into a new normal of around 30%. Take a third of Americans out of offices, and city landscapes change as well. People leave downtown office buildings and stay in their residential neighborhoods, hollowing out the central core, along with the businesses that once thrived there. That can be a boon for neighborhood business districts, but it comes with a strain on infrastructure designed to serve populations commuting to and from downtowns throughout the week.
This has clearly had a big impact on breweries. Downtown Portland once boasted eight breweries; today it has three. Meanwhile, Breakside, which I mentioned earlier this week, has been planting new taprooms in the suburbs ringing the city. Location, location, location goes the axiom—but how weird is it when the ground beneath our feet shifts.
3. Grief and Loss
In April of 2020, when the country was in the middle of the first and largest shutdown, I visited and photographed 17 empty Portland-area breweries. I was surprised in returning to that post to see that seven of them had closed. To get through the pandemic, we kept our eyes on the horizon. Yet we lost so much along the way, including 1.2 million lives. (My aunt was a victim.) The scale of loss and the tight window in which it occurred meant that we couldn’t properly process it all. I don’t think my experience is unusual in that I carry with me residual trauma from that time. It may have scabbed over, but the wound is still there.
4. Economic Upheaval
It’s not so good for business when the world stops. Countries responded differently to the pandemic, and in the U.S., the government was very generous. We lost some breweries, for sure, but in the weeks of the first shutdown, we thought we might lose most of them. Thanks to quick action, breweries and other businesses got government funds to tide them over and most did survive.
Then something interesting happened. As a result of these interventions and their success, President Biden was able to spend in ways no President since FDR has. But it also created a backlash, one we see playing out now as the Trump administration attempts to strip the federal government down to its bones. The pandemic unleashed big spending and big austerity. The changes have often been bad, but the uncertainty is worse. How do you plan when you don’t know what your costs will be?
For businesses—very much including breweries—the climate has been unstable. Inflation followed the government’s Covid infusions (everywhere, not just in the U.S.), and the Trump tariffs threaten to super-charge them. Business is left holding the bag.
5. Drinking Habits
This last category is more a tease for what our brewery-correspondents are going to tell us, because I have no clue. The data is contradictory. For years we’ve been hearing that N/A is the new growth sector (though it’s barely growing), but at the same time within the craft segment, double IPAs are booming. Beer appears to be the sick man of beverage alcohol, but it doesn’t seem like wine, spirits, or “fourth category” drinks are tearing it up, either. We often talk about how listless the beer industry feels right now, but that is true across society. Is anyone excited about anything? Something fundamental has shifted, but damned if I know what it is.
So how to characterize it? Like this: after five very, very long years, I think everyone can agree we’re never going back to the before times. If we haven’t individually come to the conclusion that this is a chronic situation, collectively, that’s how we’re behaving.
The novel coronavirus that blossomed into a pandemic five years ago today permanenly changed human society. It will take more than five more years to grasp the mechanisms and results of this change. (If we have the stomach to look back; following the 1919 flu epidemic, they didn’t.) But look at the frayed world we now inhabit (the beer world and the world world), worse in the U.S., but evident everywhere. It’s impossible not to see how Covid caused or hastened so much of the wreckage all around.