It’s been a difficult year for the Brewers Association, though for somewhat different reasons than it has for its dues-paying members. For breweries, draft beer and taproom margins disappeared. For their industry group, it was the big, money-making events that vanished.
According to its 2019 Stewardship Report, events brought in about 58 percent of the BA’s revenue last year and 59 percent in 2018. There was no World Beer Cup and no World Brew Expo trade show in April, while the Craft Brewers Conference shifted to an online-only series of seminars. The BA’s American Homebrewers Association also shifted its Homebrew Con to an online event in June. In the spring and summer, meanwhile, the group laid off more than a third of its staff.
Now it’s autumn, somehow, and the pandemic is still with us. Normally this is when many of us would converge on Denver for the Great American Beer Festival, the Brewers Association’s marquis event. That event will happen, but in a radically different form.