Consider this my official mea culpa.
I dropped the thread.
A few weeks ago, I was rolling right along detailing the origin story of the brewery—specifically the never-ending, soul-crushing saga of hunting down a location. Then life intervened. I took a week off to head up north and decompress. Unfortunately, work did a good job of following me on vacation thanks to worthless inept suppliers. (Big shout out to Airgas National Carbonation for keeping my blood pressure up for four days while sitting on a beach) Then I came home and had to play operational catch-up at the taproom. Then the logistics of rebuilding our burned-out house took center stage again.
It turns out that balancing an eight-year-old on summer break, managing a full-scale residential rebuild, and steering a small business is a lot. Who knew?
None of this is fundamentally new territory for me. I’ve kept an overflowing plate since I was twenty-five. If you read this blog, odds are you do the exact same thing. Most of you are business owners, operators, allocators, or some uniquely stressed combination of the bunch. You don’t know how to idle.
So consider this your formal invitation to take a breath.
Full disclosure: this is entirely a “do as I say, not as I do” situation. I promise I’m actively working on slowing down, but historically speaking, I’m terrible at it. As I finish up this final draft I have just mashed in and will bang out my 21st day at work in a row.
Over the last month—both during and after vacation—sleep has been hard to come by. Random, uninvited anxiety spikes have been creeping in at odd hours. Lately, my nervous system decided to upgrade its playbook with ocular migraines. It’s essentially my body staging an aggressive intervention when my brain refuses to listen.
My internal wiring operates with a very specific, stubborn kind of humor:
“Oh, you figured out how to box-breathe your way through a panic spike before it derails your afternoon? Cute. Here’s a blinding headache, pal. I’ll figure out a way to force you flat on your back one way or another.”
I’m hitting publish on a Saturday morning on purpose. If you’re reading this right now, take it as your cue to step away from the keyboard, touch grass, and find something that genuinely recharges your battery instead of optimizing your weekend for peak efficiency.
We’re putting the serialized brewery saga on pause for a beat and circling back to finish that story later this fall. There is simply too much happening across markets, liquidity, and interest rates to ignore right now. Plus, in just a few short weeks, I’m making my annual run out west to Huntington Beach for the Future Proof Wealth Festival—one of my absolute favorite weeks on the calendar. Along the route, I’ll be hauling beer cross-country to Denver to drop off entries at Great American Beer Festival headquarters. More to come on that trip soon.
For now, consider regular programming officially restored. We’ll dive back into macro, micro, small business and market realities next week.
In the meantime, remember: sometimes doing nothing is the highest-ROI move on the board.