Cayuga County breweries agree that COVID-19 has made the last year a transformative one for their industry.
But there s less consensus about how they be affected by the recent legalization of marijuana in New York state.
For this edition of Cayuga County Craft, I asked our breweries to look back and look ahead: How has COVID-19 changed beer over the past year? And how might legal marijuana change it over the next?
All the breweries who responded were quick to describe how the pandemic has disrupted their business. The major change, they said, has been the precipitous drop in traffic in their taprooms due to both New York state guidance and customer discretion. As a result, packaged beer has become a much bigger priority for them than draught beer. More of their product is going in cans than in kegs, if not all of it. So breweries like Aurora Brewing Co. in Ledyard and Prison City Brewing in Auburn can not only sell more beer to go, they can distribute it to stores they couldn t be