Hopkins Brewing Company
Address: 1048 East 2100 South
Telephone: 385-528-3275
Website: hopkinsbrewingcompany.com
District: Sugar House
“I did this because I love it. I love my community. This is my passion. It’s my life.” Chad Hopkins, owner of Hopkins Brewing Company, was born and raised in Sugar House, long before it became one of Salt Lake City’s busiest and most rapidly changing neighborhoods. The Sugar House of his childhood was defined by local shop owners, modest storefronts, and the freedom that came with growing up in a close-knit neighborhood.
“Sugar House was a lot different in the ’80s,” he recalled. “It was poor. It was pretty run down. We didn’t have a TV or anything. You came over here, and it was all local businesses. There were no corporate businesses at all, just small independent places.” For Chad, that version of Sugar House was a playground. He spent his days riding his bike, skateboarding through the neighborhood, and exploring the local shops that lined the streets. By the 1990s, as a teenager, he was frequenting places like Heavy Metal Shop, Blue Boutique, local skate and music stores, Raunch Records, and the old dollar movie theater. He remembers the area where Whole Foods now stands as little more than old houses, open lots, and places for kids to roam.
After high school, Chad joined the Army Reserve around 2000, spending time in South Carolina and Texas before returning to Sugar House. Back home, he began working in restaurants, learning the business from the ground up. By the time he was twenty-two, he had become general manager of a Little Caesars franchise. He loved it. “I realized this is what I want to do,” he said. “I want to run restaurants.”
From there, Chad continued managing and opening restaurants, including corporate chains. Around 2012, he spent a couple of years at Whole Foods in Cottonwood during what he describes as the company’s “pre-Amazon” years," when he found himself surrounded by home brewers, food people, artists, and like-minded coworkers. It was a good fit.
By 2014, Chad had moved into restaurant consulting. With a small team, he helped take old restaurants, remodel them, build new concepts, create menus, put systems in place, train teams, and then hand the owners the keys. He enjoyed the work, but after years of opening restaurants for other people, he wanted something of his own.
At the same time, Chad had been home brewing for about ten years. What began as a way to make the beers he could not find in Utah had grown into a serious hobby. His beer had taken over his basement and garage. Chad entered competitions and won medals. Once a month, he would bring his homebrew to a poker game with friends, and they kept telling him the same thing - he should open a brewery.
Eventually, some of those friends became business partners. Chad began looking at properties and first considered a spot on State Street near Epic Brewing. When he reached out to Epic’s owner to make sure there would be no hard feelings about opening nearby, a different opportunity came up. Epic had originally opened the Sugar House space as The Annex around 2013, but after several different attempts and concepts, the location had not worked out. The brewing equipment and kitchen were already there. The license was still in place, but only if Chad could open quickly. In the fall of 2018, Chad got the keys. He had six weeks. “Challenge accepted,” he said.
The basement was a mess. The brewing equipment had not been used in years. Chad spent days cleaning, repairing, replacing parts, buying missing equipment, and getting the place ready. Epic’s crew helped clean the tanks and make sure the system was usable. Chad hired a cleaning crew, stripped the space back to something fresh, and began reworking the layout. He also changed the feeling of the room, removing televisions from the bar because he wanted people to talk to one another, move around, meet friends, and feel part of something. He wanted a brewery that felt more like a neighborhood gathering than a place to sit silently and stare at a screen.
Hopkins Brewing Company opened softly on December 14, 2018, with only a few beers on tap and a menu Chad was still developing. He brewed, cooked, created recipes, and worked seventeen-hour days. Sometimes, he slept there brewing at four in the morning. The official grand opening was New Year’s Eve 2018, with a live jazz band and a full room. “It was awesome,” Chad said. “It was a big party. It was really good times.”
The name Hopkins was not even his idea. After trying to come up with brewery names and finding that almost everything seemed to be taken, one of his partners suggested simply using his last name and it stuck.
From the beginning, Chad wanted Hopkins to be more than a place to drink beer. He describes it as a gastropub with good bar food, but elevated - made from scratch, built around local and sustainable ingredients whenever possible. The burger uses local grass-fed beef, the giant pretzel comes from Dangerous Pretzel, and Hopkins makes its own beer cheese. The menu includes burgers, sandwiches, salads, wings, fish and chips, specials from the chef, and Sunday brunch with fresh biscuits and gravy, breakfast burritos, Bloody Marys, and local coffee from The Bean Whole.
The beer, too, is personal. Chad created his own recipes, shaped by years of home brewing and by the water, equipment, process, and ingredients that make each brewery distinct. He does not treat recipes as secrets, because he believes even the same recipe will taste different on another system. One of his favorite details is the malt. He works with Solstice Malt, a local maltster and friend who makes malt specifically to Chad’s specifications. Once, while visiting his friend’s house, Chad noticed a dead cherry tree outside. He cut off a branch, and it became the inspiration for a cherry wood malt made for Hopkins.
The space itself is part of the story. Hopkins sits in a historic Sugar House building that Chad believes was once part of the area’s furniture district when companies like Granite Furniture helped define the neighborhood. He points out the original ceiling, the old floors beneath the current ones, the basement rooms, the exposed brick, old stairways, and a vault that may date back to another early use of the building. In the basement, where the brewery equipment now sits, there was once finished showroom space, carpet, wallpaper, and signs. The building has been covered up, uncovered, remodeled, preserved, and changed many times. Chad loves that. The layers matter to him.
Today, Hopkins has the easy, casual feeling Chad hoped for. Guests order at the bar rather than waiting for table service because he wants people to move around. Regulars come in often, and travelers sometimes arrive with luggage or ski bags, saying Hopkins is their first stop after the airport or their last stop before leaving town.
There are games, including Binho, a tabletop soccer-style game that Chad brought in after discovering it downtown. Tuesdays are trivia nights and often packed. Wednesdays are his favorite because Wednesday is jazz jam night. Musicians - professors, students, traveling players, and local regulars - come through and play. Chad, who grew up playing bass in bands and now also plays drums and piano, has always had music in his life. Some of his childhood friends became professional jazz musicians in New York. This connection between beer, food, music, and community feels natural to him.
Although Chad now has a head brewer, chef, and general manager, he is still very much involved. Some weeks, he is there every day. Other weeks, he does more of the administrative work from home. When he is in the brewery, friends show up, conversations start, and it becomes harder to get paperwork done. Still, he loves the hands-on parts - fixing things, pressure washing the patio, jumping behind the bar when it is busy, making cocktails, and running food.
The last few years have not been easy, however. Like many small businesses, Hopkins had to fight through Covid, construction, rising costs, and the challenges of running an independent business in a neighborhood where rent keeps climbing. Coming out of Covid, Chad bought out his partners, including several who lived out of state. Hopkins is now his. He appreciates that independence.
Chad thinks often about the importance of local ownership - not only for Hopkins, but for Sugar House as a whole. He speaks warmly about other neighborhood business owners trying to keep things local, including Jimmy and Jordanna Brown at Fiddler’s and Sugar House Pizza, and Derek and Jennifer Williamson at Neighborhood Hive. To Chad, they are all part of the same effort - people who grew up in or care deeply about Sugar House, fighting to keep the neighborhood from becoming unrecognizable. “We’re probably about the last two little Sugar House kids fighting to keep this place alive,” he said of himself and Jimmy. “Keeping it local.”
For Chad, that is the heart of it. Hopkins Brewing Company is a brewery, a restaurant, a jazz room, a neighborhood hangout, and a deeply personal expression of the place that raised him. It is also proof that a local business does not have to be polished into sameness to succeed. It can be relaxed, generous, a little scrappy, full of friends, full of history, and full of life. “Local small businesses are so important. Supporting local small businesses is one of the most important things you can do, because you’re not going to get the experience we have here in a corporate-run restaurant.”
