America’s Alcohol Industry Needs a Drink

In the spring of 2020, as a brand-new disease spread rapidly across the United States, millions of Americans arrived at the same conclusion: They wanted a beer.

This was, to be fair, the same conclusion that many of us were coming to before the pandemic began, but the ways we could satisfy that thirst had changed dramatically. As beer spoiled in kegs inside idle bars and restaurants, Americans set out in search of six-packs. Liquor stores and grocery stores, which were both categorized as “essential businesses” and allowed to operate during even the tightest local lockdowns, saw their alcohol sales spike. Booze-delivery services such as Drizly more than tripled their sales. As with things like paper towels and flour, beer producers and distributors scrambled to divert their product into the right packaging and onto the right shelves.

This swing has caused people to speculate that Americans, a theory that sounds plausible enough—life has been bad and also boring—but hasn’t really panned out, in the aggregate. Total alcohol consumption in the United States has been quite steady for years, including last year, says Lester Jones, the chief economist for the National Beer Wholesalers Association. What has changed, though, is virtually everything else about drinking. Swirling beneath the placid consumption rate was all the cultural and logistical chaos that has defined American life in the past 15 months: Supply chains broke down at the same moment that our lives changed in ways that had us scrounging around for sources of comfort. Now beer sales offer a glimpse of the lives we want for ourselves—and how disaster-borne limitations are still getting in the way.