Ice cold beer is great. Frozen beer is not.
That's why, with a historic deep freeze gripping the Midwest, beer deliveries are on hold in some parts of the region.
Temperatures are so low that beer will freeze -- around 32 degrees or slightly lower, depending on alcohol content -- on the trucks before it can be delivered.
Kegged beer in trucks froze Tuesday, before temperatures even reached their coldest.
"Most of the folks up north are not delivering," says Mike Madigan, president of Minnesota Beer Wholesalers Association. "Most distributors are not delivering in the Twin Cities, down south and out west."
In Minneapolis, the temperature Wednesday hit minus 26 degrees, with a wind chill of 53 below zero.
The only other alternative -- transporting beer in a heated truck -- is enough to make even a casual beer drinker gag. But until the cold subsides, Madigan says, it's the only way for beer to get delivered.
"There's a few (distributors) that have heated trucks," he says. "But there's not many. You tend not to need heated trucks."
