For a lot of people in the beer industry, the 2020 Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywine Festival was the last time they got to see each other before the pandemic hit two months later.
Laura Lodge guessed early on that it would be a very long time before those people saw each other again — at least in Breckenridge, where Big Beers takes place. And she was right: Laura and her brother Bill, who founded the event with her in 2001, had to cancel the 2021 iteration due to the pandemic. As a result, Lodge moved temporarily to Ohio where she could be close to her father and oversee a project making thousands of homemade masks for frontline workers and organizations in the Cleveland area.