The mind reels.

Two semi-trailers loaded with beer were stolen from the Atlanta craft-beer-maker SweetWater Brewing Company last month.

That works out to about 3,300 cases of beer, or 78,528 bottles, according to SweetWater.

It also represents about one week of sales by the brewery.

The thieves were brazen. They pulled up with two tractors in the dark of night and hooked up the trailers, which were parked outside the brewery in an area without any security cameras.

Some of the beer was found quickly, and most of the rest was recovered within a week.

And the saddest part?

All the recovered beer will be destroyed.

The company had no idea where the beer had been, or it if had been tampered with, and has sent the lot of it to a recycler.

Oh, the humanity!

If the thieves had been able to secure their stolen beer, and there were just the two of them, driving the trucks … their haul would have allowed each of them to drink two SweetWater beers a night for 19,632 days — or 53-and-a-half years.

(Not that beer would still be tasty after 53 years — or even one. So they could have put on a five-case beer bash every night for a year and still not have run out.)

They beers were part of a special shipment of “summer variety packs” with multiple varieties of beer, including three India pale ales, one of which was the company’s special “Goin’ Coastal” IPA with pineapple flavoring.

The theft was big news in Atlanta, where some suggested the crime paralleled a movie:

According to Fox News: “The warehouse where the beer was found isn’t far from some of the locations where the 1977 movie Smokey and the Bandit was filmed. In the movie, Coors Beer is hauled across the South with a sheriff in hot pursuit. Those similarities have led to plenty of jokes inspired by the movie since word of the crime spread through the SweetWater plant.”

As of June 30, no arrests had been made.