How nanobreweries are shaking up Portland's beer scene

Inside 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) 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, and crawls around some of the best are a popular night out for locals and visitors alike.

But while many other US cities have now surpassed Portland’s brewery count, Oregon’s beer scene is evolving in ways few people could’ve expected. The pandemic played its part, shutting down many microbreweries and taprooms across the city. As a result, thousands of workers were laid off and, since 2019, barrel production in Portland has declined by a third.

All this on its own should’ve been enough to discourage the next wave of craft brewers, but in fact it led to the birth of more beer start-ups, as veterans and have-a-go hobbyists alike found themselves with time to experiment at home. Suddenly, brewers of all levels had the freedom to play around with the four main ingredients of water, grain, yeast and hops to create their dream beer. 

These days, most locals in the know say the Greater Portland area is home to around 20 nanobreweries, defining the concept in simple terms. If an empty fermenter is light enough to be picked up by a single person, it qualifies. Those in the nano industry also say the beer has to be drunk locally and not exported. For the majority, the idea isn’t to grow a huge audience, but to make their existing customers stick around and beg for more. 

Seasonal flavours

The day after my visit to Little Hop, I head east of the Willamette River, where salmon and steelhead fisheries, not hops and barley, once made fortunes and determined lives.

There are a multitude of reasons to drink beer — social, emotional — but I’m increasingly interested in the personalities behind the pilsners. People like Alyssa LeCompte and Mike Lockwood, who I meet at Duality Brewing in Central Eastside. Their minimalist nanobrewery launched in May 2023 — not that one could tell it’s such a recent opening on this warm evening a couple of months later. The terrace is full to overflowing, despite the owners eschewing signage or anything else announcing their presence. A smart move, I think, if you’re trying to remain low profile.

“It’s an odd way to run a business,” concedes Alyssa, in reference to the lack of signage. She pours me a hazy blood orange-flavouured cream ale in a stream of bubbles — it’s pearly blonde, with the potency of a kiss and a taste like a bitter, frothy ice cream. “There’s just enough beer for the weekend, but then it’s gone. We only want to work three days a week, so the nano model fits us perfectly.”

As at Little Hop, Duality became a place where Alyssa and Mike fulfilled the fantasies of their pre-pandemic lives. Before settling in Portland, the art school graduates worked in a distillery in New York, and Mike later started home brewing while living in Los Angeles. The couple eventually moved north a few years ago and rented a shipping container as a makeshift brewery. Now they’ve taken over an inner-city lot. Mike still drives the kegs from this improvised lab to their bar — a sleek wood-and-stone hangar that could easily be mistaken for a Tokyo design studio — in the boot of his car.

Behind it all is the idea of connecting with Oregon’s seasonality and creating ingredient-driven beers that pair well with food. Currently sharing the site tenancy is Astral, a Mexican pop-up offering small plates like ahi tuna tostada and wahoo ceviche, which harmonise with whatever’s on tap. I try a citra-hopped table beer alongside slivers of pork belly chicharrón (fried pork rinds) and need little encouragement to order more — the meat is lightly oiled and golden, the beer adding caramel to the springy, salty snack.

Next comes a rye and hibiscus lager aged in grappa oak, paired with chilli asparagus and sugar snap peas topped with a blizzard of cotija, an aged Mexican cheese. The food is a passport to a beach in the Yucatán, the beer like a floral explosion, rather than something concocted in a corrugated steel box. 

Portland’s nanobrewing scene is less bookish and cerebral and more fun than the approach taken by many brewers I’ve met over the years. The usual norms don’t apply here, and this bold experiment is now moving beyond the city limits to the grasslands. This is a part of Oregon where time is marked by the crows of scratching roosters and the growl of tractor engines as farmers tend their grain.

A 25-mile drive north of Portland takes me to Columbia County and Crooked Creek Brewery, run by Dave Lauridsen. A former advertising and celebrity photographer, he moved here from California. Insects thrum and hens scamper around his backyard coop as sunlight pours down over the farmlands. 

It’s a swathe of countryside resembling a Mondrian block painting — all burgundy-red silos, blue sky and bright yellow sun — and so far away from Portland in feel, if not distance, it seems surprising the nano trend is taking hold here. But taking hold it is, and Dave welcomes me into his converted garage, where he pours out a selection of tasters that make it clear why this is the case. There’s a Belgian-type hazy IPA (grapefruity and smooth), a dry hopped blonde ale (toasted and buttery) and a saison with prickly pear and apricot (jammy and bold). 

They’re all deliciously autumnal, although the turn of the leaves is still a few months off. After the tasting, I wander over to the eponymous crooked creek on Dave’s property to watch it glow in the sun. The nano life seems pretty sweet — creativity and freedom abound, and it genuinely seems to bring people together, whether that’s brewers and the employees of food businesses, or friends meeting for a drink poured from a shed on wheels. 

“We don’t just make beer,” says Dave, as the yeasty whiff of fermentation carries out from the lock-up onto the cooling breeze, “we create human relationships and are building a community.”