To me, the most surprising thing about 2020 is that regular life keeps on going.
We are in the midst of truly exceptional circumstances, a pandemic unlike anything seen on this planet since the Spanish Flu of 1918–19, and yet people are still doing many of the same things they were doing before this disease arrived. Despite all the weirdness, some are treating this year as if it were the same as any of the years that came before it: People are still getting married, having babies, and launching into space. For many of us, it feels like everything is going over a cliff, and yet somehow not everything is falling.
In the beer world, that means that we still have new releases, even if people can’t wait in line or attend traditional launch parties for them. Toppling Goliath still needed a lottery for the release of its 2020 Kentucky Brunch Brand Stout, even if that lottery is going to be limited to curbside pickup. Tables inside the brewery’s taproom are now spaced at least six feet apart, and masks will be required when customers are not seated, barring another closure of bars and restaurants by Governor Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Department of Public Health. Roughly 5,000 miles away, the Czech nationally owned brewery Budvar put its new Budvar 33 into cans and made them available throughout the Czech Republic during our nationwide lockdown this spring, while its competitor Radegast released the most bitter Czech 10º Lager ever brewed. While we wait—for the illness or for a cure—we might as well have fun new things to drink.
It’s not just the liquid that keeps on flowing. Despite the fact that bars are regularly ordered to close, new ones are still opening up. The most interesting new kneipe in Berlin, perhaps the best new pub in all of Germany, Schneeeule Salon für Berliner Bierkultur, launched late this summer. The beer writer Melissa Cole opened Match:Box in London while another beer writer, Katie Mather, is about to open Corto in Clitheroe, England. We are dying, and yet we live.
The reason this is strange, I suppose, is due to my own lifelong habit of bunkering down and waiting at length, either for circumstances to change or for something in particular to happen. John Lennon taught us that life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans, so I understand, at least theoretically, that life must go on: While I am personally hibernating, it is possible that entirely normal events are taking place outside my cave. But deep inside I still expect everything to freeze over until the thaw.
On the other side of Prague from here there is a date on the front of my brother-in-law’s house which always surprises me, as it happily announces—along with, if I remember correctly, either two or three friendly, stuccoed swallows in flight—that the stately building was completed in 1943. Every time I see it, my brain wobbles slightly. In the middle of World War II, in a country occupied by the Nazis, people were still building beautiful new villas with the sleek designs of high modernism? Oh, but yes. Life goes on, old sock. In fact, houses are still being constructed today. People are still falling in love, launching new businesses, creating wild and possibly disgusting new alcoholic beverages, and opening great new neighborhood hangouts, despite the difficulties of our present circumstances. And they always will.
Of course there’s no one “most surprising” aspect to the beast year that is 2020, but many: The whole thing is uncharted territory. I suppose there might be a few 110-year-olds who lived through the Spanish Flu early enough to have functional memories of it, and who are still conscious and verbal today; for the rest of us, this is all surprising in ways we did not and could not have expected. And that is another strange angle to 2020: that even though humans have lived through plagues and pandemics throughout our recorded history, all of this is somehow new to us—both what happens and how we react to it, both the waiting and the doing.
