“Coronavirus Diaries” Now Available as a Book
I’ve posted some pretty interesting stuff in the fifteen years of Beervana’s life, including the voices of hundreds of people in and around beer. At the very top of the list, however, are the forty-odd posts from brewers and one cidermaker that constitute the Coronavirus Diaries series that ran on the site from March 2020 to this May. It’s a funny thing to admit that some of the site’s best work was written by others, but it’s true.
As a thank you to the contributors, I put the material together in a proper book format. I wanted them to have a record of their work, something to revisit as the pain of the moment softens. Since memories tend to fade, I thought they’d appreciate a reminder of how difficult the ordeal was, in their own words, as it was happening.
Now that I have disbursed copies to those folks, I thought you might be interested in a copy as well. To make the book feel more complete as an intact account, I added a prologue and updates about the progress of the virus (case and death counts, key events) each month the pandemic went on. It gives the story a sense of context to understand what was happening with the case numbers and government response as you read the brewers’ updates, and the posts hang together with impressive coherence.
(And yes, it’s true that outbreak isn’t over. I acknowledged as much in the final post in the series. It will linger months more in the US, at a minimum, and will be years before the world is rid of Covid-19. The active phase of the brewers’ response, however, has passed. Breweries and other businesses have developed strategies for managing periodic closures, shortened hours, and other interruptions. As an account of their response, the book feels complete.)
I know it’s not a happy subject, and you may not want to revisit it. I get that. But I was struck, as I edited the posts and put this book together, by all the small details of the crisis I’d forgotten. Our memories streamline events. A history written after the events of the pandemic would filter out much of what happened. Because these posts documented events in real time, you have a moment-by-moment sense of the emotion of brewers who didn’t know what would happen and who weren’t sure their businesses would survive. It offers a living, breathing story full of the confusion, uncertainty, and emotion of the unfolding crisis.
Another fascinating current that runs through these accounts are premonitions of how a permanently altered world would emerge as a result of the pandemic. In the midst of the closures, many of us might have assumed that breweries would be more wary about taprooms and draft sales, the dimension of the business that stopped almost entirely in mid-March 2020. Yet that’s not what they decided, and during the months of their diaries, four of the five regular correspondents opened new taprooms. The companies’ pursuit of direct-to-customer sales, the purchase of new canning lines, and their strategies to stay in touch with customers—all of those will live on in the years to come. We get to see them emerge before our eyes.
In the end, what I liked the most in these posts was the transparent emotion the writers brought. So many of us tumbled through those early months in emotional chaos—fear, anger, depression, and resignation. The writers in the series didn’t shy away from revealing how the pandemic felt. It is powerful reading. I can’t thank them enough for revealing themselves. They gave us the words to express what we were feeling.
About the Book
I make no claims that this is a highly-polished, professional book. I was trying to put something together that is as free of typos and mistakes as my eyeballs could make it. (No single editor catches all.) I also tried to include a cover that was striking if not the kind of professional design Jordan Wilson or another pro would make it. I think the front and back covers showing deserted public spaces do an able job of that. Still, it’s a DIY production, a kind of bloggy ‘zine between paperback covers, and I hope you appreciate the garage aesthetics it offers.
By: Lisa Allen (Heater Allen), Van Havig (Gigantic), Adam Milne (Old Town) Ben Parsons (Baerlic) Matt Van Wyk (Alesong). With: Alan Taylor (Zoiglhaus), Nat West (Reverend Nat’s Cider), and Tobias Hahn (Rosenstadt) And: Jeff Alworth (Beervana).
Pages: 22
A Beervana Book, $12
Description
“On March 16, 2020, Oregon's Governor Kate Brown shut the state down for a novel coronavirus that was spreading like wildfire. That shutdown lasted, in various forms, for the next fifteen months. The Coronavirus Diaries documented the real-time efforts of Oregon's breweries to survive this ordeal. Regular dispatches from five brewers and periodic reports from several more informed readers of how they managed to survive. In more than forty reports over that span, they describe their challenges, worries, and often clever solutions. It is a remarkable document of resilience in an impossible time.”