The team at Atlas Brew Works prepared their special spring release the same way they do with every new beer. Late last year, they started fermenting, had a couple taste tests, and finally—the last step before canning the brew—they sent the design for the beer’s label out to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

Because of the government shutdown, the process halted there.

Now the Ivy City brewery is stuck with a whole tank of IPA brewed with fresh apricots that may never hit shelves. “It’s fermenting, currently,” says Justin Cox, Atlas Brew Works’ CEO and founder. “That will have to sit in our tank.”

Part of the Department of the Treasury, the TTB regulates alcohol, tobacco, or firearm-related businesses in a handful of ways: If you’re opening a liquor store, distilling a new liquor, or paying taxes on your cigar shop, you’ve got to deal with them. The TTB also reviews labels on cans, bottles, and kegs of all wine, malt beverages, beer, and distilled spirits in the United States, ensuring they carry information like the alcohol content by volume and the Surgeon General’s warning.

Having been deemed nonessential in the wake of the shutdown, the agency has suspended processing applications for label review, meaning that Atlas’ apricot IPA label for its kegs—along with those of who knows how many other brewers, distillers, and other alcohol manufacturers around the country—is stuck in limbo. A notice on the bureau’s homepage warns visitors that its personnel are neither reporting to work nor responding to any inquiries. “Submissions will not be reviewed or approved until appropriations are enacted,” the site says.

Once the government reopens, the TTB will likely face a backlog of applications from manufacturers who are antsy to start selling their products. If the shutdown stretches on for much longer, it could lead to liquor store shelves that are devoid of new products.

“The number one question we get asked is ‘What’s new since the last time I was here?'” says Erika Goedrich, owner of D.C.’s Craft Beer Cellar on H Street.

She addressed the issue in the shop’s newsletter last week. She points out that users of the beer rating site BeerAdvocate added more than 70,000 new beers to its database in 2018—meaning that new beer is being released all the time, and at a high volume.

“Even if only a quarter of that that has to go out and get label approval, think about all the backlog that’s being created by all that new beer,” Goedrich says.

The process of getting label approval from the TTB normally takes about three weeks from submission to approval, according to Cox. Approval for cans of the IPA, called The Precious One, came before the shutdown, but labels for kegs of the beer, known as “keg collars,” are still in limbo. Had those labels been approved as per usual, kegs of his apricot IPA, called The Precious One, would have been able to be sold in other states by February 1. (Intrastate sales are allowed to proceed without label approval, as of 2013).

Now, that release date is getting postponed—if it ever comes at all. He can’t even switch things up and just order more cans, because getting cans made and distributed takes about 6-8 weeks, Cox says. Even if label approval comes right this minute, there’s no way the cans will make it to shelves by the beginning of February. And if they’re stuck in a holding pattern for too long, Cox says, the beer in the tank will go bad.

Plus, as long as the spring beer is still brewing, they can’t get started on their next seasonal release, a summer beer that was slated to come out in May.

“There’s an opportunity cost of having beer sitting in the tank which we could otherwise have packaged, that’s a bottleneck in our production,” Cox says. It’s especially frustrating, he says, because “we spent the 4th quarter of 2018 planning what we’re going to release, our recipes, and marketing plans for new beers. Now we’re trying to execute that plan but we’re in a holding pattern.”

Cox says if the label approval doesn’t come soon, he’ll need to find something to do with all that beer, just so Atlas can get on with its regularly scheduled beer production. He’s still thinking through his options: They could sell it by the glass in the taproom, as they’ve been doing, but Cox says it’s unlikely that traffic to the brewery would ever demand a whole tank of beer (he estimates that only about 10 percent of Atlas’ beer is consumed in the taproom). He could share the beer with some of his distillery neighbors in Ivy City, who might choose to distill it into a liquor. But something as delicate and fruity as an apricot IPA isn’t usually best for distilling, he says.

The nuclear option is looking much more likely.

“In the past we’ve had issues with a beer we can’t sell,” he says. “Sometimes we have to dump it. And that hurts, emotionally and monetarily.”

Cox says he hasn’t estimated the cost of sending all that beer down the drain (“I’ve been sort of putting my head in the sand”), but he’s already trying to whip up new solutions. 

“The beautiful thing about craft beer is that we’re resourceful companies so we can come up with something new and great to market pretty quickly rather than those big guys,” he says.

This story has been updated to reflect that the label for kegs, not for cans, has not been approved.