Cut off from bars and restaurants, people began buying up the beer in grocery and liquor stores, and brewers were forced to pivot as quickly as they could. Beer production “is not a speedboat; it's like an aircraft carrier or cruise ship,” Jones said. “You start turning that rudder and three miles down the waterway, the boat starts to turn.” For many producers, planning the types and amounts of beer they’ll brew starts anywhere from six months to a year in advance, and that includes contracts for cans and glass bottles. Getting more of that packaging while virtually every beverage company in the country wants to send more product to grocery stores inundated with customers stuck at home has been all but impossible, contributing to an aluminum-can shortage that won’t abate any time soon. For much of the past 15 months, your first-choice beer might not have been consistently available at your local grocery, even if the brewer had plenty on hand. When buyers have to settle for their second or third choices, their tastes start to change. “People have tended to go toward the products they understand and know,” Joe Gold, a lead distributor at Chesapeake Beverage, in Baltimore, told me. “The experimental beers that were there, or that brewers were trying to come out with, they just got kind of pushed to the side.” Craft brewers finished 2020 with sales down 8 percent, while macrobrewers such as Anheuser-Busch and Molson Coors had a strong year. For the first time in his career, Gold said, he found expired Budweiser in the stockroom of a liquor store—not because people weren’t buying it, but because the cases had been misplaced behind a supply of craft brews that hadn’t been touched.