Polar Vortex 2019 Puts Freeze On Beer Deliveries

From St. Louis to Milwaukee and the Dakotas to the northeast, the polar vortex has much of the country below freezing temperatures. It's so cold that mail delivery by the U.S. Postal Service stopped in parts of 10 states, train tracks in Chicago were set on fire for safety, Amtrak halted service in parts across the Midwest and some cities in America are colder than Antarctica.

It's so cold that beer delivery even stopped in parts of the Midwest.

As below-freezing temperatures have affected 75 percent of the country's population, beer deliveries in parts of the polar vortex region have come to a halt. Why? The beer inside the trucks is freezing. Not just cans and bottles are freezing, even keg beer is even turning solid.

"Most of the folks up north are not delivering," said Mike Madigan, president of Minnesota Beer Wholesalers Association. "Most distributors are not delivering in the Twin Cities, down south and out west."

The temperature in Minneapolis and St. Paul early Wednesday evening was minus-18, with a minus-35 wind chill.

There's an option to transport beer in heated trucks, but those are few and far between, Madigan said. And if those trucks do get on the road, they would most likely encounter snowy and icy roads.

"There's a few (distributors) that have heated trucks," Madigan said. "But there's not many. You tend not to need heated trucks."

Minnesotans like their beer, drinking 28.4 gallons a year apiece as evident in this report. But residents in the Gopher State aren't among the top 10 states in beer consumption per capita in one year. States across the Midwest are mostly in the top 10, though.

Of the states facing the most frigid temperatures in this vortex, eight of them are among the top 10 beer drinkers per capita. New Hampshire leads the pack at 40.6 gallons per person in one year, followed by Montana (39.4), North Dakota (38.3), South Dakota (38.2) and Wisconsin (34.3) in the top five. Maine, Nebraska and Vermont are polar vortex states ranked in the top 10 beer drinkers, along with residents from the warmer states of Nevada and Texas.

Folks in the polar vortex cone like their beer, but probably not when it's warm, which is the only way it can be delivered until the weather gets warmer.

Some cities and states are experiencing their coldest temperatures in history. Wind chills dipped into 50-below zero in central Illinois on Wednesday, and colder than 60-below zero in some parts of Minnesota.

Things won't be much better on Thursday as temperatures across the Midwest, Northeast and along the Canadian border are expected to remain below freezing.

It's so cold in this polar vortex that videos have surfaced of people tossing boiled water into the air, only to see it vaporize. And then there's this tweet of someone tossing hot coffee into the air, only to see it disappear.