“Back in engineering.”
The modest update to George Adams’ LinkedIn profile might have caught me by surprise, if not for the honesty with which he handled the closing of his business, GAEL Brewing Company, in October. Adams had spent a career in engineering before opening GAEL in 2015, the brewery a conspicuous outlier in his 25-year-long resume.
Adams’ brewery closed down in 2020, a year in which many thousands of beer businesses were predicted to shutter because of COVID-19. While Adams didn’t talk to local media when announcing the end of GAEL, his main public comments, posted to a now-disappeared Facebook post, pointed the blame squarely at himself. “I made many catastrophic strategic business mistakes especially early on that contributed to this decision,” he wrote at the time.
There’s a brutal honesty and straightforwardness in that statement that we’ve missed this year (even if it’s characteristic of people from Upstate New York). Adams’ response, his humanity and humility, stood out at a time when he could have blamed plenty of other factors—from the pandemic to state government restrictions to local competition—for the closure. There is no joy in celebrating someone’s failures—as Adams movingly wrote in his business’s goodbye, “A significant part of my life is gone.” Instead, I found myself drawn to this graceful act of pure honesty, which felt so foreign amidst the devastation and losses of 2020.
This year, half-truths, lies, misdirection, and just about any avoidance of reality became a pivotal part of our shared experience in some way. Here was George Adams writing that the local market “has spoken loudly and they rejected our brand. I have failed. It is that simple.”
Now “back in engineering,” Adams’ resume says he’s working as a system engineer at Thales, a French aerospace, defense, and technology company. I realize it may not be as fulfilling a dream as the one that manifested in GAEL. But how many of us get to say we did such a thing? That alone is cause for recognition and appreciation.
As a stranger from afar, I hope the end of this confusing and difficult year brings him happiness. The truth is that he deserves it—just like the rest of us.
Words,Bryan Roth