Brujos Brewing Crafts Liquid Spells and Big Ambition
If you’ve spent time in the last couple of years looking at breweries on Instagram, you might’ve come across the mysterious Brujos Brewing, whose cryptically cool slogan “Crafting Liquid Spells” beckons your curiosity. Influenced by heavy metal and the occult, Brujos has been putting out pastry and barrel-aged stouts alongside big hazy IPAs while occasionally collaborating with breweries. All of this has fueled speculation as to who is behind Brujos, whether it’s even a real brewery, and how the hell one goes about acquiring the beer. The answer is somehow both complicated and less mysterious than you might think.
Brujos is the side project of the award-winning brewer Sam Zermeño, who got his start at Black Market Brewing in Temecula, CA before he was drafted as the first brewer at Oregon’s Newport Brewing Company. That job wasn’t exactly what Zermeño was looking for but he did fall in love with Oregon. It wasn’t long before he caught the attention of Great Notion in Portland – which had recently moved into their expansive Northwest production facility - and made the move to the other side of the coastal range.
Starting as production lead brewer just before the pandemic, Zermeño soon got promoted to head R&D brewer, meaning that he now splits his time between the original Alberta brewpub and the production facility. During his time with Great Notion, he has created recipes for beers such as the Mad Batter and put his creative touch on a slew of Great Notion’s stouts and hazys. Through it all, he has kept the Brujos project going strong and sharpening his skills.
“I’ve been brewing at my house for [about] seven years. Just this past year I put a lot of my own money into it. I was like ‘fuck it, I’m just going to buy the equipment’, because I want to make better beer and become more familiar with better equipment. It seemed like the right time to do it,” he says.
Considering that he works at Great Notion, it might come as no surprise that Zermeño specializes in the kind of hypey beers that grab attention such as pastry stouts and hazy IPAs, citing Stone’s Xocoveza as an eye-opener on his beer journey.
“I guess I’ve been a pastry boi at heart since the beginning. These sweet, adjunct stouts caught my attention and I started trying all kinds of stouts via friends that I started meeting. I just became obsessed after meeting people that were just as passionate about drinking these beers and brewing,” says Zermeño.
It was out of these experiences that he launched Brujos as a side project to tinker with recipes while also pursuing his career as a professional brewer. The name Brujos is Spanish for sorcerers or wizards and if you catch a glimpse of his labels and merch, you can quickly see the kind of tone Zermeño is going for.
“I’m Mexican so I really wanted the name to be in Spanish. I had all these stupid names written down. One day I was brewing in my driveway with my brother and my dad was there and he was like, ‘You guys look like brujitos making potions.’ He said brujitos and I was like, ‘fuck, brujos could be a really cool name.’ I’ve always been into black metal, doom and weird subgenres of metal. It all made sense when the name came and I just went for it and I’ve been brewing non-stop since,” he says.
Working off a 1 bbl unitank system out of his garage in North Plains, Zermeño is constantly tinkering with new recipes and dialing in his skills as a brewer while also generating buzz with the kind of big-flavored, high ABV beers that make traders salivate. Releases to date have include a rye bourbon barrel-aged imperial pastry stout treated with Tanzania and Ugandan vanilla beans, Ecuadorian cacao nibs, marshmallows and graham crackers (“Famine”), an imperial pastry stout treated with Tanzania vanilla beans and hazelnut coffee (“Holy Death”), a spunded, triple IPA loaded with Citra and Strata hops (Al-Kuhl), and an imperial pastry stout conditioned on coffee, Sicilian pistachios and Tahitian vanilla beans (Litania), among others. He has also collaborated with breweries like Little Beast in Portland, Wake Brewing and Soundgrowler in Illinois, Beer Zombies, Electric Brewing, 8 bit Brewing, Solaris, Creative Creature and of course Great Notion on styles like sour IPAs and lagers, the latter of which he hopes to brew more of."
At this point in time, those collaborations as well as his Great Notion beers are your best chance at trying Zermeño’s creations, unless you happen to trade with someone in his member club aka “the Order of the Magus. This club consists of less than one-hundred people splitting his batches of around 130 bottles or cans, mostly friends of Zermeño, who make donations to a cause of his choosing while covering his overhead since he isn’t a licensed brewery at this point. The rest of us can still purchase Brujos merch, which is frequently refreshed. Though that might all sound super exclusive and frustrating to anyone who just wants to try the damn beer, Zermeño’s long-term goal is to open a full-fledged brewery or something of the sort, where he would do more of the beers that are putting him on the map.
“If I were to open my own brewery, I would focus heavily on barrel-aged stouts since I love the style. I feel like that’s my forte. I just love brewing them and tasting them and trying new things with them. Maybe that would be membership stuff and everything else would be available to the public. It would be small to the end. Quality over everything - that would be my focus,” he says, while pointing out that while he admires the expansive and innovative business model of Great Notion, his brewery would be a humbler operation.
At this point you’re likely wondering when we can expect this to happen. The short answer is that there isn’t an exact date yet, but Zermeño is ambitious and set on making it happen. He also plans to keep it in Oregon. For now, he is still focused on stirring up momentum and refining his skills as a brewer so that when the day does come, it will be well worth the wait.
“It’s been about building the brand, that’s been my whole vision since I started. I was like, it needs a name and I need to build a brand so that if I do take the leap and open a brewery, I’ll have a following and people will be like ‘fuck yeah, this motherfucker finally did it.’ It’s worked out so far,” says Zermeño.
