Saturday, March 2, was a dismal day in Portland, Oregon. It drizzled on and off, only rising out of the 30s for a few hours in the afternoon. Yet, it was rocking in Northwest Wilson, an otherwise sleepy, industrial street hidden behind Highway 30. People spilled out of a nondescript warehouse building and huddled under tents that dotted the pavement. Up a flight of stairs, a blackened taproom squirmed with bodies. Grim reapers greeted guests entering what owner Sam Zermeño calls his “scorched church.” He was opening the doors to his new brewery, Brujos Brewing, and casual fans might have been surprised at the turnout.
Exactly 40 years ago, BridgePort Brewing opened a bit more than a mile from where Brujos sits today, in a different nondescript warehouse, eventually becoming one of Oregon’s most successful breweries. In the intervening decades, beer had become old hat in Portland, with brewery openings rarely drawing big crowds, as they’ve become a ubiquitous part of local culture.
The turnout had a shade of irony: Brujos now occupies the shell of a former brewery that attracted so little attention it lasted just two years. This was an unusual unveiling—and an instructive one. The brewery and taproom were making their debut, but Sam had been nurturing Brujos as a side-project for years. It was a DIY labor of love that started in a 10-gallon mash tun and attracted fans by word of mouth. Long before Brujos materialized on Wilson Street, its spectral force lived in Sam’s mind and sometimes in containers he first hand-filled, and later brewed on commercial systems, all the while gathering fans like a dark congregation. With its gothy theatricality, the Brujos experience was immersive and tactile. It was also an important reminder that beer can be a whole lot of fun. And when it is, people engage.
The sense of playfulness that suffuses Brujos goes back to a family driveway in Southern California. In 2014, Zermeño and his brother used the cement strip as their alfresco home brewery, and they quickly fell in love with the creativity and joy that the act of mashing in brought them. One day early on, the brothers were crouched over a steaming brew kettle when their father stepped outside to join them. “Look at you two,” Sam says, imitating his father. “You look like brujitos making magic potions.” In Spanish, brujos means sorcerers or warlocks; brujitos “little sorcerers.” Zermeño wasn’t sure what his project was going to be, but he knew he’d found the name.
Born in Tijuana 39 years ago, Zermeño arrived in the U.S. at 8, when his family emigrated to California. They moved around when he was young, settling in Riverside. He was working as a truck driver when he started homebrewing, having discovered craft beer in his 20s. An “artsy kid,” he was immediately drawn into the world of beer, and not just for the liquid. “I was always looking for cool labels. There was a local brewery called Craft Brewing Company, and their slogan was ‘brewing magic since 2009.’ I was completely into that.” He’d experimented with many creative outlets, from music to photography, and even started his own skateboard company when he was 15. “I’ve always wanted to have my own brand,” Zermeño says. When he discovered homebrewing in 2014, though, something clicked. It was the first time he felt inspired to be creative and look for new ways to express himself.
“The moment I started brewing, I thought, ‘This is it. This is the shit.’ The whole process of brewing was very whimsical, the mashing in and the steam and the pots just looked super cool,” he says. “I thought, now I can apply all the witchy shit that I’m into, the dark metal and the psychedelic rock and roll.”
Zermeño is slight, with long salt-and-pepper hair and a graying beard that makes him actually look the part of sorcerer rather than brewer. On an industry night before the public opening, he wore a long pea coat that added a Rasputin cast. He’s soft-spoken and not immediately demonstrative. Get him talking about things he loves, however, and he becomes animated, using salty language for emphasis. The occult has always attracted him, and beer seemed like a perfect template to express it. He recalls what inspired his inaugural batch of homebrew: finding a can of extract labeled Hex Nut Brown Ale. “I was like, ‘Ooooh, Hex! Fuck yeah, I’m going to brew that shit!’”
Despite growing up in Southern California, where craft beer has long had a hold, he didn’t love most of the local beers. “I couldn’t stand IPAs. I thought they were so bitter—and they were, back then.” Instead, he started making malty beers, especially stouts. “Maybe because I’m Hispanic and we love chocolate in our culture, I resonated with stouts.”
“The moment I started brewing, I thought, ‘This is it. This is the shit.’ ... I thought, now I can apply all the witchy shit that I’m into, the dark metal and the psychedelic rock and roll.” ”
It wasn’t long before hazy IPAs came along, and those became a passion. He didn’t realize it until he got to Oregon years later, but the local water was especially well suited for the full-bodied examples he liked.
As do many homebrewers, Zermeño created labels for his homebrew, but that didn’t satisfy his creative itch. Soon he had added merch like stickers, T-shirts, and even customized glassware. Before long, friends were trading Zermeño’s Brujos homebrew for commercially made beer and tagging him on Instagram. He was years from owning a brewery, but to the handful of people who’d encountered bottles of homebrewed Brujos or seen it online, it looked like a fully commercial operation.
In 2016, Sam’s friend Kyle Boruff hired him on as an assistant brewer at Black Market Brewing in Temecula, California. It’s not unusual for homebrewers to find the romance seep out of brewing when they spend eight hours a day lifting, hauling, and cleaning, but Sam loved it. When asked what he enjoyed about those days, he actually ticks off the “boring” stuff—learning “all the ins and outs of keg-washing and canning and transferring and CIP, all that shit,” he says. “Kyle taught me everything grown-up brewers do.”
In the meantime, he was still homebrewing. Through his first four stints as a professional brewer, Brujos would remain the one constant in his brewing life.
“I was still making [beer] on the side even after I got off work from brewing. My wife was like, ‘You’re a maniac. Why are you still brewing?’” Working for other breweries gave him the experience he needed, but Brujos was always the focus.
While he was at Black Market, he heard of a new brewery about to open in Newport, Oregon. He’d spent a year in Washington State and loved the Pacific Northwest. His wife was able to work remotely, so they packed up and moved to the rainy Oregon Coast. Newport is a beautiful town, but remote and isolated, and a year later the Zermeños relocated to Portland. There, Sam took a job at Great Notion Brewing—which, at the time, was the most in-demand brewery in Portland, getting press and accolades from across the country.
His first day at Great Notion was March 2, 2020—not ideal for a family looking to find community in a new town—but it was a great fit from a brewing perspective. Despite the pandemic, Great Notion made hazy IPAs like Ripe and Juice Jr., and dessert stouts like Double Stack—the kinds of beers Zermeño liked—and it was one brewery that took marketing and branding as seriously as he did. He felt isolated socially, but his career was taking off.
“I was still making [beer] on the side even after I got off work from brewing. My wife was like, ‘You’re a maniac. Why are you still brewing?’”
More importantly, he approached Great Notion about turning Brujos into a bona fide side project, brewed and packaged on their system. “They were like, ‘Yeah, dude, that sounds like something cool and new. We want to support you.” It offered Zermeños his first opportunity to produce Brujos commercially, selling it at periodic can drops at the brewery. For the first time, Brujos was a genuine commercial beer.
“I think the earliest we saw someone in line was at 7 a.m.,” says Mat Sandoval. One of the owners of the year-old Living Häus Brewery, Sandoval is describing the scene at the Brujos beer releases he witnessed in 2023. Zermeño left Great Notion to brew at Living Häus in 2023 specifically because it had a contract-brewing arm, and his regular Brujos releases became blowouts. “Sales didn’t start until noon,” Sandoval says of the events. “Eventually, we started to go get donuts and just handed them out to people waiting in line.”
“Craft beer is very communal. If you’re into beer, you have a place here.”
Living Häus is one of Portland’s recent stars, focusing on lagers and West Coast IPAs, but Brujos’ popularity was on another level. “Those events were wild. They reminded me of things I used to do eight to 10 years ago,” Sandoval says, calling back to a “line culture” that defined some of the most hyped beer releases in the 2010s.
One of Zermeño’s fans was Jesse McFarland, a co-founder, along with Scott LeMaster, in the new, brick-and-mortar version of Brujos. Years ago, McFarland started popping into Great Notion after his shift selling fishing boats. He was a big fan of Great Notion’s hazy IPAs, and had gotten into the world of can-trading after moving from Florida. He’d strike up conversations, and soon met Zermeño, who’d retire to the bar in the afternoons. Eventually, McFarland connected with Zermeño while the latter would have his shift drink after work, and they struck up a friendship. “He was very warm and kind and always told me what he was working on,” McFarland says.
For McFarland, Brujos offered more than good beer. “The community aspect of it is really big to me, moving here from Tampa Bay,” he explains. “Craft beer is very communal. If you’re into beer, you have a place here.” On Saturdays, he would time his lunch breaks with Brujos releases at Great Notion, and enjoyed all the excitement around those events.
That connection would ultimately lead to the partnership on the new brewery project, but it was emblematic of what attracted people to Brujos. Sam creates meaningful, lasting relationships. “What I truly, truly respect is how he’s taking care of all these people he’s worked with,” says Sandoval. Zermeño returned to the same Tijuana artists he knew to create a sign in the form of the Brujos logo for his new place, and brought many of the artists he’d collaborated with to work on the new place. That loyalty goes both ways, as fans followed Zermeño and Brujos from California to Oregon, brewery to brewery.
When his chance finally came to open a brewery, Sam wasn’t about to create a generic industrial space. The taproom instantly became Portland’s most exotic, one that incorporates a mélange of occult and religious themes. Brujos had lived on labels and merch, but with a taproom, Zermeño could recreate his vision in three dimensions. Huge circular chandeliers light the dim space, which at times has fog rolling though. Cathedral arches rise above the bar and frame the brewery, and customers sit in pews. It’s hard not to want to immediately plunge into the space like it’s a carnival ride, just to see what’s around the next corner.
The themes are perfect for Portland, which loves to celebrate the weird—and like the best Portland fixtures, there’s a wink behind all the elements. One is meant to take it seriously, but not literally. In fact, amid all the skulls and reapers, I sense something that seems to honor religion as much as subvert it, and I ask Zermeño if he has a background in the church. Not only did he grow up in the Catholic Church, but he’d asked his mother if he could become an altar boy. “I absolutely loved it,” he says. “Now I was a part of the ritual, not just an audience member. That’s when my love for robes came, and I eventually bought one that I would wear when I was homebrewing.”
“I love using Spanish for naming my beers. It ties into the whole occult branding, and if you care, maybe you’ll look it up.”
This is the other half of Zermeño’s ethos—an authenticity born from genuine passion. It’s not contrived, and therein lies the fun. “It goes back to his roots,” says Sandoval. “Sam has a great story and he’s always been honest about who he is. People see it and they think this is a cool, fun thing.”
Now that he has his own place, he understands that two of the factors that drove Brujos’ success—scarcity and collaborations with buzzy breweries—will give way to a more conventional and mundane existence. “All hype goes away,” he acknowledges. “We’re just going to try to make the same good beer we’re making now.”
Nevertheless, Brujos has some big advantages most debut breweries lack. Zermeño is a different kind of figure in craft brewing, and certainly in Portland. He’s both a Latino and an immigrant, and he’s aware of what that means. “It’s cool to be a person of color,” he says. “A lot of people message me on the side.” He has become an inspiration for aspiring homebrewers, people who don’t often see themselves in the industry, and young people who are drawn to this different, strange, and compelling brewery. He places his culture and heritage at the center of things, which speaks to his fans. “I was dead set on the name being Spanish,” he says. “I love using Spanish for naming my beers. It ties into the whole occult branding, and if you care, maybe you’ll look it up.”
But even more importantly, Brujos illustrates what imagination and creativity can bring a brewery beyond what’s in the glass. Zermeño has created a whole world for people to enter. It may not be that everyone would choose an inky dark taproom with skulls on the wall as their favorite decorative motif. But anything with this much personality is preferable to yet another sterile steel-and-brick taproom. In an industry still struggling after a pandemic and losing young drinkers to other kinds of alcohol (or none at all), this may be Brujos’ most important lesson. From the start, Zermeño was drawn to beer because it seemed like a creative playground. It has always been “the shit.” Stepping into Brujos, that message is impossible to miss.
Words by Jeff AlworthPhotos by Kelsey Baker
