If ever there was an argument for the existence of gnomes, Shay Hosseinion is it.
Wearing a pointy red knit hat, a beard, and a giddy smile, Hosseinion is walking me through the tap list for his Brewed by Gnomes beers, now available only at Tabor Bread on Southeast Hawthorne. The beers are unlike just about anything else you’ll find in a beer glass: whimsical, herbal, and certainly magicked into existence by what Hosseinion calls “the gnomes.”
Made nearby—just off Hawthorne at Leikam Brewery’s backyard nanobrewing facility, operated by Hosseinion’s neighbors—Brewed by Gnomes specializes in organic and mostly European-influenced wild yeast beers like a linden flower lager; a pale brown abbey ale flavored with fennel and licorice; and a Belgian ale made with Hawthorne berries, aged in a Pinot barrel on cherries and figs. It’s as if the now-defunct Commons Brewery dropped acid and joined a commune.
“I’ll be on a walk, smell a flower, and be like, ‘Oh my God, you’re going in that beer,’” he says. “I’ve always had an affinity, fascination, and attraction to different plants and flowers—the gnomes tell me, and I listen.”
Hosseinion, 42, is a physician who specializes in herbal medicine, and his passion for nature extends easily to his brewing style. He didn’t really drink much beer until his late 20s, but in 2011 the “gnomes spoke to me,” he says, and he started homebrewing. He attended the American Brewers Guild and interned at the Commons, and by 2016, he was self-distributing his own creations to taprooms like Bailey’s and Imperial. But the work it took to sell a single keg was taking its toll.
“I was always looking for a little home for the gnomes to come to,” he says.
Hosseinion says he was considering opening his own tasting room when he started talking with Tabor Bread owner Tissa Stein, and the plan to join forces gelled over the course of just a few months. On June 14, the Gnomes on Tabor space opened.
