Gavin Lord's Side Project: Hetty Alice Beers

This is an upside-down story, where the punchline comes first. Sort of.

Gavin Lord is one-third of Living Haus Brewing, the new lager-friendly company that recently took residence in the former shell of Modern Times and the Commons. If you were slightly mystified by the arrangement the founders, who also include Modern Time alums Mat Sandoval and Conrad Andrus, that’s because it was incomplete. At the time of launch, the founders described it as a hybrid model in which Mat and Conrad would principally be focused on Living Haus beers, while Gavin would run a contract-brewing arm of the business to fill up the excess capacity. That’s all accurate, but incomplete.

Gavin and I met last week and he described the rest of the arrangement. There’s one more missing piece he delayed announcing in order to giving Living Haus the full spotlight. In addition to the reported structure, however, Gavin has an alternating proprietorship with Living Haus, and beginning in September he will begin releasing a few beers under his own label, Hetty Alice, named for his maternal grandmother. The first beers out of the gate will be an IPA and a soft-bitterness Bavarian pilsner. The IPA will be a modern American IPA (“a little bit new school”), with Citra/Mosaic plus Nelson. In mid-October, he’ll release Industry Lager, which is basically a “shiftie”—the kind of beers brewers enjoy after a day of brewing.

So that’s the headline. In another way, though, the the news of the 9,301st brewery opening isn’t really a punchline at all. The more interesting story is a longer one about how Gavin came to leave his plum job and, after an eight-month road trip, find out “who I was now that I wasn’t pFriem’s head brewery anymore.”

Farming, Art, and Beer

Breweries are unusually personal businesses. I don’t know how the owners think about a new rivet factory, but it probably doesn’t occur to them to name it after their grandmother. When someone founds a brewery, though, it is often a reflection of their values, biography, and even their identity. When we sat down in those tiny booths at Loyal Legion to talk about Hetty Alice, Gavin started the story all the way back in his early teens. For Gavin, the project can’t be untangled from his life story.

He grew up in hop country in Silverton, Oregon, the son of an artist (mother) and a farmer (father). He was working on the farm as young as thirteen and driving a combine by the time he was fourteen. He worked the farm until it was time to leave home, and from those years he took the lessons of hard work and responsibility.

Yet calloused hands weren’t a complete metaphor for his life. When college came, he followed his mother’s path and was off to the Bay Area to study graphic design at the University of San Francisco. He and three friends would go on to start a cooperative art studio while he did printmaking and freelance graphic design. “I wanted to turn this artistic side of my brain on,” he said.

This was the other half of his personality, but it also found an outlet in different form of art. Gavin brewed his first batch of beer over Thanksgiving when he was 19 with his brother and father, and continued while in San Francisco He was brewing once a week with friends under the guidance of legendary homebrew shop-owner Greg “Griz” Miller. “I realized the thing I was most excited about was getting home to check on my homebrew,” he said.

After a few years, the three owners of the co-op sold it for a six-pack of beer (Gavin took two bottles of Anchor Steam in payment), and he returned to Silverton to pursue beer.

Silverton to UC-Davis to Hood River

Gavin started his brewing career at Seven Brides in Silverton in 2009. That brewery struggled for years before closing in 2018. It was a hinky, poorly-constructed brewery, but served as proof of concept—brewing was what he wanted to pursue. He was soon off to work for mobile bottler Green Bottling. Meanwhile, he was doing coursework in Salem to prepare for the brewing program at UC Davis—apparently chemistry and biology weren’t high priorities in art school. UC Davis was challenging, but he managed to pass the grueling nine-hour, 18-question test on his first try (only 32% do), and he was ready to work in a more professional context than Seven Brides offered. A week after graduating from Davis, Full Sail hired him in Hood River.

He was happy for his tenure at Full Sail, which is a very busy production brewery. At the time, they had a busy contract brewing component, which while not exciting, was enlightening. But perhaps the most important detail of his time there was who he worked with. Full Sail’s head brewer was a guy named Josh pFriem. Like Gavin, Josh was learning about production brewing and in 2012 he founded his own brewery.

In 2014, Gavin went down the hill to work with Josh, where he would ultimately become the head brewer. In his years there, he became a partner to Josh on their growth and expansion, and in some ways as much a face of the brewery as Josh himself. In early 2021, just before Gavin gave his notice, pFriem had become one of my sponsors. I remember talking to people there—they were stunned to learn that Gavin was leaving. Michelle Humphrey and I had been working on a video series that featured him—and he was similarly embedded in projects across the brewery. It was a sudden departure that seemed to catch everyone by surprise.

The job entailed long hours and hard work, but offered incredible creativity. Gavin had been leading construction of the new project in Cascade Locks, where pFriem has a coolship and vast barrel house, and he was supposed to shift over there once it opened. At the same time, the brewery was installing a new, larger 35-barrel brewhouse back in Hood River, but in late 2020, two of the Germans installing the equipment got Covid. Gavin was pulled out of Cascade Locks and swung into action to help finish the brewhouse project.

In fact, Gavin’s departure seemed like it even came as a surprise to Gavin, too. He hadn’t been secretly planning an escape—pFriem had become his world. The Cascade Locks project, Covid, the new brewery install—it all left him exhausted. “That was seven years with a really intense 18-month finish,” he said. He and his wife Giselle planned to take a big chunk of time off—it turned out being eight months—embarking on a #vanlife adventure throughout the Western US and Mexico. He didn’t have a plan for what came next. It was the third extended trip he’d taken in his life, and his only goal was to decompress and figure out where he wanted to go next.

Hetty Alice

The next several months allowed Gavin to put the stress aside, but it also exposed an identity crisis. We spoke for the better part of three hours, and a lot of that time was devoted to pFriem. My sense is that Gavin hadn’t planned to cut his time short, and that it was a series of events that led him to hand in his notice—not least was Covid, which caused everyone to stop and consider their lives. “I’m really thankful for my time at pFriem,” he told me. “I can’t put a measure on how much I learned while I was there.” He talked about what it was like to absorb pFriem’s culture, where you’re not just trying to make good beers. “Josh wants to make the best beers in the world,” he said, admiringly. pFreim had become a part of Gavin. Leaving, he said, “felt as foreign as cutting off a limb.”

Pottering around the West Coast and visiting friends, and especially arriving in Mexico, where he’d spent some of his very early years, allowed him to center himself. “It was really important for me to actually go through the experience of letting that part of my life, that identity, go.” You already read the ending, so you know what happened next. “Within about two months, I decided I wanted to go back to Portland and open up a brewery.” A brewer starting a brewery isn’t exactly unexpected, but Gavin was able to reconstitute a vision for a brewery that was authentically his own, and it took the ramble in an old school bus to discover what that meant.

His original plan had been a brewpub—one that shifted when he spoke to Mat and Conrad and toured the empty Modern Times brewery. It was a fantastic opportunity, but that building doesn’t have a kitchen. His idea for the company and its values, however, were the same. Good breweries reflect the personality of the owner—it’s where they derive that authenticity, he concluded. For him, that means family, sustainability, and “satisfying these two parts of my personality. I want to be creative and I want to work hard.”

He named the brewery for his maternal grandmother, an inspiring woman he described as “generous, kind, and craft-y.” Portland has a vibrant, creative community, but he saw some space for “relentless positivity” of a kind Hetty was famous in the family. She was born in the late 1920s and lived to 88, so she saw a lot of hard times. Yet she embodied kindness and generosity, he told me, and recounted how she opened up her house to the family, and always kept space open for anyone who might show up.

Sustainability is important to Gavin, and he has found a supplier for compostable can holders, and a local printer who is able to digitally print cans in lots as small as 1,200—no plastic shrink wrap or label necessary. Ultimately, of course, it will come down to the beer. He and his wife Giselle intentionally chose Portland for this phase of life (as opposed to Hood River, you can find a house here, he joked). That means he’ll be selling beer in a market that has some of the country’s best lagers and IPAs. “It’s really, really important to me that the beer is extraordinary,” he said, knowing it will have to be.

So, a brewer is opening a brewery. The announcement isn’t going to cause an earthquake, at least for the drinkers who already have so many options. It’s a big deal for Gavin, like so many people who launch a brewery. “This is my chance to have something that represents my identity and my family’s identity.” Breweries are not rivet factories; they’re a calling. Hetty Alice is Gavin Lord’s. Look for the first cans to begin appearing in about a month.