PORTLAND
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nside the suburban garage, sunlight angles in amber and gold, while two torpedo- shaped fermenters — one named Hank, the other Steve — are gently rumbling. At the controls is the generously bearded Zak
Cate, the co-founder of Little Hop Brewing and a craft beer obsessive who rarely makes the same barrel twice. He’s the dynamo behind this private afternoon tasting session at his home, flipping taps to release coloured streams of pale straw, maple and ruby brown. The air is thick with the yeasty scent of toasted hops and grain. “For an American beer, the first sip is a
punch in the face,” he says, raising his voice above the whirr of machinery. He’s telling me about one of his absurdly small-batch creations — which range from malt-heavy IPAs to herby farmhouse-style ales, not yet in fashion — which sit fizzing gently in 16-ounce tumblers on the hand-sanded counter. An exhale, a good- natured cheers, a flash of light through the glass, then our drinks are held high in front of our gleaming eyes. We grin like children. The beer rises from the glass, suds
swimming at the top and dressed in all the colours of summer. It’s fresh as the morning sun and hoppier than a German kölsch, with hints of pine and grapefruit. A second glass is poured, a rising tide revealing a fruited sour beer in a deep, hazy butterscotch. The first sniff is of burnt vanilla, the flavour tropical, and it’s impossible not to love it. “I’m getting late autumn harvest on the palette,” Zak jokes. “Like Oregon peaches and pineapple.” All this hipster geekspeak contrasts
brilliantly with the suburban set-up. Zak’s childhood home in Multnomah County, southwest Portland, now doubles as a brewery, the garage kitted out with load-bearing flint foundations and a steel ventilator that was formerly used as a horse trough. Upstairs is Zak’s daughter Wallis and in the backyard beyond the washing machine and utility room are the family dogs, Winslow (a labradoodle)
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and Paco (a puggle). Out front is an eggshell- blue vintage farm truck, rebuilt by hand. Oregon has long been a place of pilgrimage for
craft beer-lovers, but now it’s the springboard for the ‘second coming’. Zak and his high- school sweetheart and now wife, Lisa, have been brewing for years. Before the pandemic, he was a tastemaker at McMenamins, the originator of Oregon’s first brewpub — and the couple are now part of a new but growing community of ultra-small brewers. Never mind microbreweries — these are nanobreweries. And you only truly understand this term when you behold the tiny scale of a shoestring operation such as the Cates’. Whereas big-name Portland craft beer brand Widmer Brothers has a 250-barrel system with capacity to fill 300 kegs per hour, Little Hop would take a lifetime to do the same. It has one tank and two pairs of hands — as bijou as it gets for beer. “When you’re this small, you don’t fit in the
box for anything,” says Lisa. The garage serves not only as a brewery, but also as a production line, canning plant and tasting room. It’s not open to the public, but Zak recently finished hand-building what he calls “the tiniest tap house in America”. Something akin to a garden shed on wheels, The Little Hop House sits on a peaceful residential corner not far from the couple’s home, attracting dawdlers and dog walkers curious to find out what this cute little clapboard trailer is doing here. What it’s doing is selling top-notch beer. At weekends, Little Hops’ brews are poured from the trailer’s six taps and dispensed to local customers from a serving hatch. The vibe is Cheers meets B&Q, but with added wildflowers and droning bees in summer. Portland is a city where you’re never far
from a good beer. The streets are populated by breweries that started out in the late 1980s, when distribution laws changed and brewers were allowed to sell direct to consumers. There are nearly 300 microbreweries in Oregon, including 83 in Portland alone. Craft breweries have long been a staple of social gatherings,
Clockwise from top: Tom McCall Waterfront Park, looking out onto the Willamette River and the Steel Bridge; Little Hop Brewing operates out of a vintage farm truck; beer taps at Crooked Creek Brewery. Previous pages: Duality Brewing co-owner Mike Lockwood at work in the nanobrewery
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