Content Warning: This article makes frequent and detailed references to suicide and severe depression, therefore reader discretion is advised. No one should struggle with their mental health alone. If you are in the UK there are several charities you can reach out for support including Mind, the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) and The Samaritans, who can be contacted on 116-123. In the USA you can contact Kevin’s Song on 313-236-7109.

***

One night in December 2023, Julie Etheridge had a dream about her husband, Brad. They were in an all-white room, just the two of them, and neither said a word, but she felt the love they shared. He moved toward her and hugged her, and she said I love you. They were instantly transported to an outdoor concert on a dark night, where she could see the stage and the lights in the distance, and could feel rain falling on their embrace. He moved them toward an enclosed space, and even though people were coming and going, and the music thrummed, they were in their own personal world.

“Brad just pinned me against the wall and we kissed, and then I woke up,” she says. “And I truly feel like that was him letting me know, ‘I love you, and we're good’.”

Brad Etheridge, aged 43, had taken his own life two weeks earlier.

Brad was a professional brewer, an actor, and generally the most entertaining personality in any group. He was a husband, a father, a brother, a son, and a friend to more people than could fit at his memorial service. On the night of November 25th, 2023, he became one of the more than 49,000 people who died by suicide in the United States that year, the highest in the nation’s history. For reasons those who loved him will never fully understand, this vibrant personality turned off the lights and left the stage long before his show was supposed to end.

While any death is tragic, suicide in particular leaves open wounds in place of closure, and questions in place of answers. It’s why the dream—even though it came deep in the trenches of ongoing grief—meant so much to Julie.

“I truly feel like that was him letting me know, ‘I love you, and we’re good’.”
”

— Julie Etheridge

“It was just me looking at him and he was looking at me and there was love and forgiveness and everything I wish I had told him before he died,” Julie tells me, as we chat half a year on from Brad’s suicide “It was all said in that room without being said at all.”

Unfair and reductive as it may be, Brad’s memory will always be connected in some way to his final action. Suicide stands in our memories as a cenotaph to the peace we were robbed of. His life, however, was so much more than this moment, and its end is a reminder of the importance of destigmatising mental health issues and opening important dialogues around depression and suicide risk, particularly in the beverage alcohol industry.

***

Julie met Brad in 2004 when she was a grad student enrolled in the University of Southern California’s film program. She was casting the lead for her unique interpretation of The Wizard of Oz, in which the Tin Man was looking for love. Brad was an actor trying to make a go of it in Hollywood—he had minored in theatre at Michigan State—and when Julie saw his headshot, she called him in to audition. He never showed. In most cases, that would be the end of an actor’s chances with a director, but Julie had a good feeling about him. He asked for a second audition, and ultimately got the role. Two years later the pair were dating, and they married in 2009.

The Etheridges lived on one of the winding residential streets of Beachwood Canyon, under the watchful gaze of the famous Hollywood sign. Acting opportunities were scarce—Brad grabbed some small TV roles, and is credited as “Singing Server” in 2010’s Easy A, the movie that made Emma Stone a star. His primary work at the time was as a server at the Boneyard Bistro, a popular barbecue place in Sherman Oaks. He helped the restaurant develop a killer beer list, while also taking up homebrewing as a hobby. The Etheridge home was where their friend group of actors and musicians would gather, and everybody drank Brad’s increasingly impressive beer.

Throughout the couple’s sojourn in Los Angeles, Julie worked in film production. In 2010, she was assigned to work on a movie being filmed in Detroit, Michigan. Brad grew up in Grosse Pointe, a suburb of Detroit, and they decided to both spend the summer there while the film was being made.

“We had just gotten on the 101 about 10 minutes into the drive, and I just felt in my gut that we were never coming back,” she says, recalling their drive on the storied highway heading north out of LA. “I can’t explain it. I just started crying.”

She was right. The movie got cancelled, but they decided to stay. Brad’s family was in the area and the film industry in Detroit was booming thanks to favourable state tax incentives. Ironically, the city gave them both better opportunities in the film industry than in LA. Unexpectedly, the move gave Brad a chance to start a new career; his homebrewing talent got him hired by Erik Harms at Dragonmead Brewery, who became one of his best friends. He was there less than a year before being offered a position as the innovation brewer at Atwater in the Park, a taproom for Atwater Brewing in the Grosse Pointe Park neighborhood.

“Brad was very passionate,”Atwater’s owner Mark Rieth tells me. “He always considered himself an artist, and was very serious about his craft, and that definitely came through. The products that he came out with I won’t say were necessarily true to style, but they were true to what he believed in for that particular beer he was making. He was very much into the story behind the beer, not just making it.”

The story behind some of the beers he created during this time had deep roots. Julie was raised Catholic, and while Brad considered himself spiritual rather than religious, the couple had their kids baptised. The baptism was held on the brewdeck at Atwater in the Park, which was housed in a former church, and was officiated by Erik’s father, a retired Lutheran minister. After his children received their baptism, Brad brewed a beer for each of his kids with the blessed water, a kölsch and a Belgian quad.

Brewing is, for the most part, a career that happens behind a curtain. Yes, a visible brewing system is a hallmark of most taprooms, and a visitor might occasionally see someone in boots and safety glasses moving a hose from one shiny tank to another, but for the most part, brewers do their work in the background. Then again, most brewers didn’t get their start in Hollywood.

““He was very much into the story behind the beer, not just making it.””

— Mark Rieth, Atwater Brewing

“Brad was never in the shadows,” Julie tells me. “You put him in a place he loves, and his spirit just shined.”

Even after becoming a professional brewer, he still found ways to host and entertain. He led beer dinners and tastings, and was a charismatic ambassador at festivals and industry events.

“Brad was a great dude, but he was a goofball,” says John Haggerty, brewmaster at Warped Wing Brewing Company in Dayton, Ohio. John and Brad met while both were in Chihuahua, Mexico, judging Copa Cerveza MX, one of the country’s largest beer competitions. One night they found themselves in a nightclub with a group of judges from all around the world. John had no idea Brad had a background as an entertainer.

“There was this really good mariachi band playing, dressed up to the nines,” John recalls. “Brad looks at me and says, ‘I wonder if they know La Bamba.’ And I’m like, ‘I have no idea, dude.’ He says, ‘I’m going to ask them to play La Bamba, and I’m going to sing it with them.’ I tell him, ‘That’s a great idea,’ because I’m thinking he’s going to crash and burn and it’s going to be hilarious. And goes up there and just kills it, he’s awesome, which is somehow even funnier.”

Brad’s propensity to do the most entertaining thing at any moment went from nailing impromptu karaoke for a group of industry peers to the kind of quiet moments that loved ones hold onto. Example: he never went anywhere without slippers. His sister, Dana, recalls a simple scene: Brad standing in her kitchen around Christmas time one year, wearing gigantic Mickey Mouse slippers and putting a crown on her husband’s head as they both drank classic Midwest cream ale Little Kings from the brand’s iconic seven ounce bottles.

“I always wanted to be like my big brother,” she says, taking a deep breath.

***

John Haggerty called me one morning in December 2023, and said he had a possible story for me. John’s been a frequent source in my articles over the years, but he’s also a friend; I’ve had more beers in his brewery than I can remember, and the first beer article I ever got paid to write was about Warped Wing (for fifty whole dollars.) Even as a millennial who never answers the phone, I generally take John’s calls.

He told me a brewer friend of his, Brad, had just died; that Brad had been in the middle of helping set up a new brewery, and the brewing community was coming together to help out. He spoke about how Brad’s wife and kids had had a tradition of getting tacos from a different Detroit restaurant every Tuesday, and that his brewer friends were sending pictures of their own Taco Tuesday adventures to the kids now to let them know they were thinking about them.

I was moved, but figured all that might come of it would be a small tribute article just to commemorate him. I asked how he died. John paused, then told me.

Depression and anxiety is something I have dealt with since early adolescence, and at a couple points—though thankfully not in more than a decade—I’ve been close to suicide. I’m on medication, and I am, for the most part, doing well right now. But acute concerns aside, there is a more constant companion that makes any conversation on this topic a fraught one for me: passive suicidal ideation.

I was in my mid-thirties when I found out most people don’t fantasise about dying on a regular basis. My wife and I were sitting in a crowded bar late one night, and I offhandedly joked about it. She stared at me. A conversation ensued. It had never come up because, well, why would it? We all deal with it, I thought.

Explaining passive ideation is difficult. Clinically, it means thinking about committing suicide without making an actual plan to do so, but the actual lived range can vary from intrusive thoughts to actually considering taking your life but not following through. The vast majority of days in my life I have not actually wanted to die. But, in the words of an excellent article on the topic by Anne Borges, I am not always very attached to being alive, either. That on its own is difficult to explain, especially in the context of a loving home life with a wife and child I adore. The thick rubber gasket that separates normal thinking from suicidal thinking in most people’s minds just doesn’t exist in mine.

At its most benign moments—which is, thankfully, most of them—this ideation is nothing more than a release valve, a form of escapism. A bruise to a thumb, a bone to worry. At darker moments, it’s an invitation. It’s not one I’ve considered heeding in some time, but it does require some precautions, and some regular reminders to myself—what Borges refers to as “flotation devices” in the ocean of suicidality your mind is floating in. If that barrier doesn’t exist on a sufficient level in my mind, it has to exist outside of it. Just discovering that this corrosive thinking isn’t normal has helped as well; when the dark clouds roll in, I’m better at realising it’s just a storm. When a depressive season comes around, it storms more often, more severely.

Here’s the thing that’s so hard to convey: I’m happy most of the time. I like my life, and have things I still want to do with it. I have supportive friends I’m honest with, and a good marriage. One of the hardest things to explain to someone who doesn’t deal with depression or passive ideation is that you can like your life and wonder if you should end it at the same time. Depression is a disease that warps rational thought—truths don’t have to line up logically. They don’t have to be truths at all.

As is often the case when someone so full of life chooses to take their own, Brad’s suicide came as a shock to those who knew him. More than once in our conversations, Julie expressed that Brad seemed happy, and he said as much. He suggested calling off a therapy session near the end because he was feeling good. He had a family he loved, he was curious about the future, and he was working on a project he cared about.

“He told the therapist he was happy,” she recalls. “And then less than a week later, he died by suicide.”

Throughout my conversations with Julie, there were plenty of moments when I wasn’t sure what my role was as a journalist, as a human being, and as someone who has dealt with mental health issues, in the face of another person crying at the memory of their departed partner. I knew early on there would be no pretence of abstract objectivity in my writing of this story. When she told me he seemed happy, and had told her he was, I told her that while I obviously couldn’t know, I suspect he was happy. You can be both. It’s hard to explain beforehand, and impossible to parse after.

Julie believes Brad’s suicide was an impulsive moment that got away from him, that he didn’t want to die. That said, she knows he had long dealt with depression, and has come to realise since his death that this wasn’t the first time he had struggled with suicidal ideation. The majority of suicidal thoughts won’t end in suicide, but eventually, one of them might. The best time to seek help—or offer it—is before the darkest moments arrive and that ability to reach out in either direction gets much harder.

““When a depressive season comes around, it storms more often, more severely.”
”

I closed my first call with Julie—unrecorded, off the record—in a daze. When my wife got home from work, I sat down on the couch beside her and tried to explain what I was feeling, wondering whether I was up to doing anything with this story at all, and if I even had a right to talk about my own struggles in the wake of someone else’s death.

It’s been a year since that first conversation; I’m still not sure. I don’t want to draw unmerited similarities between myself and someone with Brad’s stature, or between my own mental health issues and his. I never knew him, but many did, and many loved him. By merit of his personality, he knew and touched more lives than I ever will. He dealt with much that I have not. But listening to Julie talk about this dissonance within him—he said he was happy, and he also said every day was a struggle—was a sobering recognition, and I believe we need as many people within beer as are comfortable to be honest about what they’re dealing with.

Any conversation about the suicide of a brewer has to acknowledge and wrestle with an uncomfortable truth; alcohol is no treatment for depression, and it’s readily available to those of us in and around the industry. Beer has an inherent tension built into it when it comes to mental health concerns; we’re an industry that offers a chemical downer as a celebratory upper. When we’re healthy, and drinking in moderation, beer can help us ease into social situations and bond with our colleagues and friends, but when things get out of balance, it can exacerbate existing problems.

Julie was careful in talking about Brad’s drinking, not wanting to inflate a problem she doesn’t believe was out of control. But she does think Brad’s drinking likely made his struggles more difficult to manage.

“I wouldn’t call him an alcoholic,” she says, “but when he was depressed, he would drink, and then things would get worse.”

Cindy Parsons is a psychiatric nurse practitioner and an associate professor of nursing at the University of Tampa in Florida. In 2019, she and colleague Jacqueline Warner Garman (who co-owns Hidden Springs Ale Works in Tampa and is a psychotherapist) gave a presentation at the Craft Brewers Conference, held that year in Denver, on addressing mental health issues in the craft beer industry. She thinks the image of craft beer can make its workers and supporters reluctant to acknowledge the complications of mixing mental health issues and alcohol.

“We’re supposed to be the happy people,” she tells me. “Do we really want to address this in our industry?”

Cindy says research shows around 80% of workers in the US hospitality industry—including beer—have indicated experiencing mental health issues at some point over the course of their careers, while the rate for the general population is around 25%. If a person is dealing with depression or considering suicide, alcohol is likely to be a risk factor.

“There are two ways alcohol can contribute to the likelihood of suicide,” Cindy says. “First, it’s disinhibiting. It makes you more prone to doing things you’re not prone to do. The other part is that it’s a depressant, so someone with depression is now taking an additional depressant.”

While we’re getting better as a society at reducing stigmas around mental health, and having better conversations about substance use, Cindy believes we still have a long way to go. She still sees barriers to honest dialogue, and says her best advice if you know someone struggles with depression is to ask them directly about their suicide risk. It might be uncomfortable, but less so than wondering after the fact if there’s something you could have done. We have to ask those questions while we still can.

***

At the time of his death, Brad was hard at work building out the brewing system at Six Spoke Brewing in Detroit’s Corktown neighbourhood. Co-founder Joe Mifsud has owned the building Six Spoke will occupy for thirty years; it once housed Mayflower Donuts, where he found out his mother-in-law worked when she was only 14 years old. Joe got connected with Brad through a mutual friend, and hired him to design the brewhouse and take the role of head brewer once they opened.

After Brad’s passing, Joe was stunned, but—while he’d never place the emphasis on this after losing his employee and friend—he still had a half-built brewery to complete. Brad’s friend network within the industry stepped in to help, offering advice and counsel, and even showing up to address issues on site. The brewery is close to opening now, but it will always bear Brad’s fingerprints.

“We’ll find a good brewer, but we’ll never replace the person Brad was,” Joe says.

At Atwater, Brad developed a beer called Whango Wheat, an easy-drinking American wheat ale loaded with mango. The beer took on a life of its own, and served as the framework for a tribute beer made by nearly two dozen breweries in his honour at the 2024 Michigan State Brewers Guild’s Summer Beer Fest. Every single one was named Fuego de Brad.

Brad’s memorial was held at Cadieux Cafe, a historic Detroit bar where Brad had played in a feather bowling league. Once a week, on a team of fellow brewers, he played this curious Belgian game in which round discs are rolled to get closest to a standing feather, similar in concept to bocce or curling. Cadieux Cafe was packed to capacity at his memorial, overflowing with people whose lives Brad had touched. In the middle of it stood Julie, overwhelmed, receiving condolences in something of a daze. John Haggerty found her in the crowd, offered a few words he hoped would help, and returned to Dayton, where Brad had once dragged him to attend two consecutive nights of Phish concerts.

““We’re supposed to be the happy people... Do we really want to address this in our industry?””

— Cindy Parsons, University of Tampa

That’s a surprising detail I didn’t expect to learn when I started covering this story: Brad Etheridge was a massive, unrepentantly obsessive fan of the iconic jam band Phish. At the time of his death, he’d seen them in concert 128 times (the Dayton shows with John were his last). Few bands enjoy the adoration Phish has garnered since forming in 1983, and fans who travel for their shows have come to recognize the roles of particular songs in their setlists. “Tweezer - Reprise”—a condensed version of the song “Tweezer” from 1992’s A Picture of Nectar, is almost always part of an encore, or the close of a set. It’s a fast, rollicking sketch of a song, capturing the energy of the band with just a touch of their subtle but ineffable weirdness.

It was played at Brad’s memorial.

“I think that was kind of a way of saying life continues beyond this earthly existence,” says Julie, explaining that when the song’s first notes drop near the end of a show, you know you’ve had a good time, but the good times don’t have to end. “The show isn't over. You should be happy.”

The thing about an encore is you know it’s the end. You might feel bummed the show is almost over, but the knowledge these are the final songs lets you soak up those last moments fully. It’s a transition of sorts between the experience you’ve been immersed in and the one you’re about to be released back into. Part of the pain of losing someone to suicide is that we’re deprived of that awareness, that transition. The music just cuts off suddenly and the lights come up while you’re still dancing. You’re left trying to assemble a finale from memories strung along through the weeks and months that preceded that last, abrupt note.

A few weeks before his death, Julie remembers walking their kids to school with Brad. He had recently bought pegs for his bike, and he would let the kids ride on them on the way to school while Julie walked alongside.

“He just said to me, ‘Julie, come on, hop on these pegs’.” she remembers. “And at first I was like, ‘No, that's silly.’ But I had this overwhelming feeling of just do it. Just do it or you're going to regret this. So I was like, you know what? Let's do it. I hopped on the pegs and he rode me home. We passed by some friends, and it was just this beautiful moment of just pure joy being with Brad. And he died a few weeks later.”

There are no ribbons to tie on a suicide to make it a feel-good ending. It’s brutal. What’s left is for the survivors to make sense of what they’ve lost, to hold those who remain a little closer, to know it wasn’t their fault, and that the one who left really did love them. Depression is a disease, and suicide is its most merciless symptom. And I can tell you this without hesitation: people you know and love have considered it, and are perhaps considering it even now. You have colleagues in the industry who struggle with this. The only way to know—and to help—is by asking uncomfortable questions.

“I think sometimes people forget there are people who love them and count on them,” John says, taking his time between long pauses to gather his voice. “It’s just a moment and then that’s it, and they’re gone. You can’t do anything about it in that moment. You have to catch it beforehand. All I can tell you is if you’re thinking of someone, give them a call.”