Bottling in Beer Land!

This is how it always turns out for me. Battling the engineers. On some level I'm sure it's like the age ol adage of 'form over function' but in the brewing industry it's like “nature over machines.” Number Three in Central America was the odd ball. He wasn't part of the prep school group. Actually, a Canadian, he joined the group of fellas after meeting them while surfing in Nicaragua.

From what I'm told, after making a bunch of money as some kind of environmental engineer, Number Three and his girlfriend (we will call her “Sally”) decided to travel the world. They wound up surfing in San Juan and found the brewery there. I guess he had a bunch of money that he invested in their expansion project, so they let him stay. (I found out later that all the townies called him “Cocaine Number Three.”)

And then Sally left him. And that's when I entered the picture and boy was he a mess. I don't think I've ever met a man as emotional as Cocaine Number Three. And that's fine. Or at least it would have been except there were so many other challenges that we were facing that it made him a weakness. I can hardly blame him for this as I have been in that spot myself. (I found out later what an amygdala is and how unexpectedly losing a support system can be massively destructive to people.)

In addition, he was new to the brewing industry, and I could tell that he was out of touch with what needed to happen. It's that same engineer thinking that doesn't lend itself to small batch brewing. On the industrial scale, that totally works, but that was not the scope of this project and he would not stop crying. (Later, he told me how odd it was that I came to work for them and did not bring thousands of dollars with me. As a brewer? WTF?)

They called him the director of operations and we did not hit it off. Had I ever interviewed with him prior to moving down there, I'd like to think I wouldn't have taken the job. I know better than to put myself in these positions. But, I probably would have accepted and naively thought “I can change him and make him see the importance of biochemistry!” (In my travels I have found I mostly like Canadians better than Americans so this was super weird for me.)

He might have been an amazing engineer and I'm sure he was and in the brewing industry engineering is super important but as I mentioned previously, they gave all their import money to a scammer so there was no equipment for him to engineer. A man without purpose is like a ship without sails and that described Cocaine Number Three.

The point of all this though, isn't to complain about Cocaine Number Three. It's to bring to awareness how trauma and loss affect the brain. Because like it or not, convenient or not, it does. And like it or not, each of us will experience this in our lives. And when we see others in this state, we can choose to try help them through with logic and understanding or we can stand by and watch their raging amygdala attempt to run the show.