Marin County brewers suffered their first COVID-related casualty earlier this month when Iron Springs Public House in San Rafael decided, due to the economic impacts of the ongoing pandemic, to shut down. The food and drink service industry has been hit especially hard since mandatory restrictions on how restaurants, bars and brewpubs can do business took effect early in the spring, with several new rules implemented since then.

“We saw the writing on the wall back in March, when the shutdown started,” says Iron Springs owner Mike Altman. “We just didn’t know how long it would go on for, and we had our fingers crossed. By August, we realized that if things didn’t reopen immediately, we were finished.”

The taproom has been closed since March, but Altman says he had hoped for months following that a chance would come to reopen. It never did.

The decision to officially close came shortly before Marin County banned all outdoor dining on Dec. 8. Al fresco dining had for several months been restaurants’ last consistent means of doing business. Indoor dining statewide has been illegal or tightly restricted since March, with regulations waxing, waning and varying by county.

Now, Altman is hustling to maintain a sustainable cash flow at Iron Springs Pub and Brewery, the company’s headquarters and original location in Fairfax. He is relying on takeout service as well as new beer-to-your-door home delivery service at Ironspringspub.com and available to addresses in San Anselmo and Fairfax. He says he and his staff will soon expand the program’s delivery scope to other towns.

While small breweries struggle, a Sacramento trade association that represents them filed a lawsuit against the state for unfairly impacting breweries with safety restrictions meant to fight the pandemic. The suit, filed by the California Craft Brewers Association, accuses defendants Gov. Gavin Newsom and California’s state public health officer Sandra Shewry of denying brewers constitutionally protected equal protection rights, specifically by requiring in July that breweries serve full meals with any beers served but not holding wineries to the same standard.

“When it is time to begin the reopening of businesses in 2021, we need to ensure that a single industry is not arbitrarily divided based on unfounded assumptions,” says Tom McCormick, until recently the Brewers Association’s executive director.

The meal requirement, when it was first implemented, drew criticism from many in the beer industry who tought the decision was made through bias toward wine producers, a misunderstanding of how brewpubs and taprooms operate, and no firm data showing that people are likelier to get knackered at a brewpub than at a winery.

The lawsuit names just half a dozen of California’s 1,000-plus breweries as plaintiffs, yet many others have complained that the rule should be applied to all alcohol producers, including the state’s 4,000 wineries.

Altman, on the other hand, has been in agreement with the meal requirement for brewpubs, recognizing that eating food while drinking slows the rate of alcohol consumption and also slows alcohol’s absorption into the blood. He says he has observed firsthand that people affected by alcohol tend to ease up on COVID-19 social distancing protocol, ultimately increasing the odds that the virus is exchanged between individuals.

What bugs him, though, is the state of California’s overall attack on outdoor dining. Altman doesn’t believe that eating and drinking outdoors while following safety protocol and distancing standards is dangerous, and he questions the rationale for shutting down the state’s restaurant industry while allowing most other commerce, essential or seemingly frivolous, to continue on an indoor shopping basis.

“There’s no scientific proof that outdoor dining was at fault for spreading COVID,” Altman says. “There’s no rhyme or reason to what can be open and what has to be closed. You can go to Costco and walk around with crowds of people indoors, some masked, some not, some partially masked, but you can’t sit down at an outdoor table — it just doesn’t make sense.”

Through the turbulent time since the pandemic hit, outdoor drinking and dining has been the most reliable means for restaurants and brewpubs to do business. With open-air service now banned, Altman warns that without massive government financial assistance efforts, the restaurant and brewery industries “are going to see a real nosedive.”

“All those restaurant owners who invested tens of thousands in outdoor dining, they’re screwed,” he says.

Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com.