Above: Chuck Shin with a fraction of the inventory at his Seward Park location. 

Like so many new parents, Chuck Shin just wanted a beer.

Before he was an industry tastemaker—before IPA lovers around town started wearing hoodies that sport an illustration of his face—Chuck Shin co-owned a chain of optical shops. He wore a suit and tie every day.

In his off hours, Shin was really into craft beer. After his youngest daughter, Yena, was born in 2009, he spent a stint as a stay-at-home dad, a status that made it hard to access Seattle’s handful of specialty beer bars or bottle shops. Those places didn’t admit minors. Not even tiny babies in car seats toted by dads in search of a bomber bottle of imperial IPA. Beer and kids didn’t mix. Which was funny, Shin remembers today, because “When I became a parent, I ended up drinking more, not less.”

Today Shin owns three locations of the very particular phenomenon known as Chuck’s Hop Shop. In beer circles, he looms so large that nobody bothers using his last name. Children recognize him when he visits the Fred Meyer by his original store.

Imagine a band of barflies broke into a beer warehouse, filled it with tables and chairs scavenged off Craigslist, and ushered in a pack of dogs and a rogue kindergarten class. That’s the general aesthetic of Chuck’s. Coolers hold Full Tilt Ice Cream, shelves are full of gummi candies and bags of chips that help parents keep kids occupied. Photos of regulars’ dogs cover the walls. Rows of coolers emit a cold white glow and the sort of riotous color you can only achieve with roughly a thousand different cans and bottles. Behind the counter: a whopping 50 taps. Overhead, enormous screens display some of the largest, most competitively curated draft lists in the city.

Geoff Kaiser has spent the better part of a decade blogging about events like beer festivals and special releases on his Seattle Beer News website. He’s watched Chuck’s unite two seemingly separate aspects of the beer drinking experience. “It’s a family friendly place, but at the same time, it’s got a really good reputation in the beer industry,” he says. “I don’t know that many places in the country can be as successful at having that combination.”

The man who set this in motion 13 years ago is now 53, with a voice that’s soft like his plaid flannel shirts and stylish glasses befitting his time running an optical store. He didn’t invent the notion of the beer convenience store. He’s hardly the first guy to let you drink a stout on a concrete floor, in proximity to your offspring or your spaniel. People who know him describe him with extreme fondness as an idea guy. A problem solver. An entrepreneur to his core.

What Chuck Shin did do was democratize really, really good beer. First he created a gathering spot for Seattle’s craft cognoscenti—and a critical mass of products that come from our Northwest backyard. Then he threw open the doors to families and alumni reunions and friends who enjoy playing board games. He made geekworthy beer accessible to the average person and cloaked Serious Beer in a koozie of snob-free hospitality.

That hospitality extends to beer neophytes, not to mention women, drinkers of color, and all the people who were waiting just beyond that tired cliche of craft beer being the domain of white dudes with beards. Which might have something to do with Shin himself.

During Shin’s senior year studying economics at University of Washington, a friend happened to hand him a bottle of Fat Tire, an amber ale from Colorado’s New Belgium Brewing. “Literally amazing” is how Shin describes that first sip. Fat Tire was new to the Northwest and tough to find. It beat the socks off his regular party rotation of Rolling Rock and Zima.

After graduation, he worked a few jobs before cofounding a business with an optometrist friend. Along the way, Shin tried homebrewing—“too much work.” Imported Belgian beers were in vogue, but what Shin really loved was an IPA. “Now IPAs are sweeter and more crispy,” he says. “But back then, they were bitter and sort of danky. I love that flavor.”

Shin was 35 years old when a woman his mother knew through her church arranged a blind date. Yina Yoon was outgoing and intelligent, nine years his junior. But she lived in Denver. Yoon remembers showing up at the appointed time to find both of her parents, Shin, and his father. “Chuck really didn’t like it,” she says. “But his father forced him to come.”

The meeting itself was about as intimate as one might expect of a blind date that involves both parties’ parents and a matriarch from church. “You’re not my style,” was Yoon’s reaction at the time. “I was really mean to him.” But afterward, the pair started talking on the phone. They commiserated on the challenges of coming to America from Korea as teenagers—Shin was 16 when his family settled in Ravenna and sent him to Nathan Hale High School. Conversations stretched over nine or 10 hours, starting at night and halting only when the sun came up.

He and Yoon married in 2005, less than a year after that awkward first meeting. She moved to Seattle and became a good-natured companion for her husband’s frequent visits to breweries around the region—even if she prefers wine. Their start was pragmatic, but nearly two decades later, Yoon gushes about her husband as if they were newlyweds. At home, she says, Shin loves to read and loves being with their two daughters. He cooks breakfast, packs lunches, and gets their girls off to school while Yina heads to Bellevue for her job as a financial advisor.

The couple’s beer trips became more difficult once their daughters came along. Shin remembers a particular journey to Brouwer’s Cafe in 2009 for the annual release of Russian River Brewing’s Pliny the Elder. Beerwise, this event is two parts Taylor Swift tickets, one part new In-N-Out location. By then, the couple had their tasting-with-kids strategy well established: Yoon sat in the family’s Honda Pilot with the girls while Shin stood in the long line to get in. At last, he got his hands on a prized goblet of Pliny. While others sipped and savored, he drank his as fast as he could, then ran outside to take over parent duty so Yoon could plunge inside and do the same. Not long after that excursion, Shin commented to his wife, “I bet there’s a market for a family beer store.”

A new name and a coat of sage-green paint announced to the Greenwood neighborhood that changes were afoot at the beat-up convenience store on NW 85th Street. The new owner told the neighborhood blog his shop would no longer stock malt liquor and dirty magazines. In February 2010, Shin opened the doors to the spot he’d named the 85th St. Market—points for clarity. Rent was cheap. “It was probably one of the shittiest grocery stores in the neighborhood,” says Shin. “My wife hated it.”

Brad Benson, the future co-owner of Stoup Brewing, also lived nearby. He remembers going in under the old ownership, maybe to grab a bag of chips for a barbecue. “Refrigerators were broken down, Lay’s potato chips were expired. I turned the corner and there was this wall of VHS and print pornography.”

Shin had no idea how to procure the kind of beer he wanted. He’d never worked at a bar, never operated a kegerator. Not that he had one to operate just yet. He painted the interior a friendly yellow. Budweiser and Bud Light swag still adorned the walls; chips and gum and jerky filled the shelves. It was hardly the “land of a thousand beers” that would become Chuck’s motto. In fact, Shin’s market stocked 1,000 different bottles of wine. He thought a wine shop would be a fit with the neighborhood. Meanwhile, he’d fill a shelf or two with the craft IPAs he enjoyed, and be able to drink them at wholesale prices, tax-free. It was a plan befitting an economics major.

As a convenience store, the 85th St. Market was a bit of a fail. As a vehicle to explore beer, though, the shop didn’t just benefit Shin. Guys like Benson started coming by regularly. He hung out and talked with Shin as he wrote the business plan to start a brewery in Ballard. The wine soon receded from shelves. “He slowly started taking everything over with beer,” Benson remembers.

In 2010, sourcing a critical mass of craft beer was a significant achievement. Especially because Shin wanted American brews, not the typical trophy imports from Belgium or Germany. He initially struggled to set up accounts. “Craft beer was something very particular places would sell,” he says. Not rando corner stores. “Nobody knew who I was.”

He bolstered his numbers with bottles from Maine or Texas. He made the rounds, called distributors. Shin went after the stuff he liked—resplendent IPAs from up and down the West Coast. For the first year, things were slow. Shin sat beneath the sunny front windows, reading newspapers and chatting with the occasional customer who came in. His elder daughter, Yuna, would hang out with him a lot, but the four-year-old found it boring to stay too long. Shin added an ice cream scooping station; suddenly she was far more enthused.

Things eventually picked up. So did the brewery scene in nearby Ballard. Shin remembers knocking on the door at Reuben’s Brews before it was even open; Chuck’s became its first wholesale account. His growing roster of IPAs and pale ales were selling way better than the wine ever did. The beer nerds came first. They talked, did tastings, exchanged intel. “It was like a beer club,” Shin remembers. But a huge piece of what would become the Chuck’s formula, the ability to settle in with a pint, wouldn’t arrive for another year. Someone had told Shin about Super Deli Mart, a convenience store in White Center that stocked a similarly impressive supply of beer, but also poured it on tap (newly possible, thanks to a change in Washington liquor laws). He made a pilgrimage to see for himself.

Just weeks after Shin installed his own four taps, his kegerator broke. Since he was replacing it anyway, Shin expanded to 12 taps. From there, it was hard to determine what grew faster: the number of breweries in the Northwest, or the beer inventory at his Greenwood shop. By its second anniversary, Shin was up to 850 bottles and 23 drafts. The 85th St. Market became Chuck’s 85th St. Market. And then Chuck’s Hop Shop.

Jordan White came to work there in 2012, one of maybe seven employees. Not long after that, Shin invited his first food truck, the Jerk Station, to park outside. Before that, says White, Chuck’s was “a place to stop on the way home.” When they added food trucks “it became a place where you could hang out all night.” Suddenly, this shitty convenience store had all the makings of a third place.

“My sister could ride on this dog.” A little boy is chatting up the owner of a massive Saint Bernard, named Mouse, at the Chuck’s Hop Shop in the Central District. His dad is nearby ordering a beer. The woman at the next register absentmindedly strokes this unfamiliar dog’s haunches while she asks the staff about a couple saisons on the taplist. The staff working the shop on this sunny afternoon includes a stunningly low percentage of white males.

When Shin first got acquainted with beer, he didn’t always feel welcome. “Being an Asian person, when I’d go to a beer bar, I got treated not that well.” Some bartenders seemed skeptical that a Korean guy with an accent could be knowledgeable about brewing styles and West Coast IPAs. Shin noticed that specialty shops were often the least welcoming. Now that he has one of his own, “we are trying to be as not-snobby as possible.”

By the time Shin opened his second location in the earliest days of 2014, he had no problem getting breweries to take his calls.

“Being ‘on’ at Chuck’s is kind of on this pedestal” for local beer makers, says Bud Ransom, co-owner of Ravenna Brewing. “It can legitimize you.” When Ravenna Brewing opened in 2016, Ransom and his business partner, Tommy Ortega, were excited about the chance for their fledgling operation to get an audience with the buyer at the Greenwood Chuck’s. Today, Chuck’s is one of Ravenna Brewing’s biggest wholesale customers. Seeing Chuck’s staff wearing your merch or being tapped to do a collaboration beer with the shop is “a huge, huge thing,” says Ransom. “To be in a place where people go to talk about beer, not just drink it.”

The Central District location—formerly a copier repair shop and Pacific Northwest Bell office—delivered the same charming lack of charm as the original. Shin’s latest location in Seward Park, inside Third Place Books, arrived in 2022. Each store has its own buyer who decides what goes on the taps and in the coolers. And the result looks markedly different from the “danky” IPAs that originally filled Shin’s shelves a dozen years earlier.

“You can’t just have 50 IPAs on draft,” says Jordan White. “That’s just asinine.” (Though these days it would definitely be possible.) The early-days Greenwood employee became the company’s operations director once Shin had a third store in the works. Generally buyers devote 20 percent of the list to hoppy ales, then attempt to spread the rest across different styles that reflect customers’ tastes. The list changes throughout the day, as kegs move on and off, but forms a real-time portrait of what’s currently revving up Seattle’s beer community. Nobody—absolutely nobody—gets a permanent tap handle.

Established brewers view Chuck’s as a testing ground or just a place to flex and have fun. Kegs move through the store so fast, says Stoup’s Brad Benson, “If you’re playing around with a style that isn’t IPA or lager, they’re not worried about taking a risk.” Brewers say this setup pushes them to be creative, but it also makes it easy for casual drinkers to become people with informed opinions about beer.
  

Manny Chao possesses one of the rarest of all Seattle beer memories: sitting at a bar and having a pint pulled for him by Chuck Shin, himself. Chao didn’t happen upon this privileged interaction because he’s the cofounder of Georgetown Brewing, the biggest craft brewery in the state. Or because he’s the Manny, the namesake of Seattle’s go-to draft, Manny’s Pale Ale. These audiences happened because Chao happened to live near Barbecue Smith, the barbecue restaurant Shin and a partner opened in 2017. (Shin’s mom, Ok Soon, arrived each week to make kimchi to go with the brisket and ribs.)

As Shin presided over the bar’s 12 taps, the two beer icons would chat about brewing and their shared perspective as Asian Americans in a notably white industry. Barbecue Smith only lasted a couple years, though Shin doesn’t sound too ruffled by its failure. “I have to try different things,” he allows today. “When I feel like it’s a good idea, I have to do it to see if it’s going to work or not.”

Chao remembers Shin as a highly competent bartender, but his real influence lies in making craft beer an act of community rather than a niche hobby for those in the know. “Right now there are so many other products out there” for people to drink, says Chao. Shin’s especially influential now that craft beer sales no longer grow at the runaway pace of past decades. In a world full of hard seltzers and CBD drinks and canned negronis, “We don’t necessarily need to be trendy,” says Chao. I just want people to remember that it’s good.” Even better, beer is usually made nearby.

Today, Shin likes to say his job is mostly paperwork. But he’s still very much the face of the business—as in his face is the company logo. The illustration includes his trademark glasses, but with a hop cone in place of each lens, giving him an air of psychedelic awe. In reality, it’s the face of a guy who knows the least-glamorous details make a difference. A guy who hacked a project management software to color code each beer on his massive taplist based on its style, in order to help customers zero in on stuff they’ll like. The face of a guy who figured out a legal loophole so Chuck’s can import coveted beers directly from states that don’t otherwise distribute to Washington.

When the pandemic descended on Seattle, Chuck’s was quick to turn its parking lots into tented beer gardens that remain in place today. Inside, a section of the taps pour craft cider, ginger beer, and kombucha for customers who don’t do gluten or alcohol. These days his staff conducts the sort of conversations Shin once had at his original shop, recommending a great pilsner out of Oregon or pointing customers toward newcomer Bizarre Brewing. Contemporary breweries rotate through so many different styles and recipes, these recommendations feel like a much-needed compass.

A lot has changed. Shin’s girls are teenagers. “They want alone time instead of family time,” he laments. The newest Chuck’s location in Seward Park is almost jarringly handsome compared with its no-frills predecessors. It’s unlikely you’ll ever see a case of Fat Tire, the beer that ignited Shin’s love in the 1990s, in the cooler. He remains faithful to his IPAs, but when Shin rattles off the best things he drank lately, the list is as cool and curated as one of his taplists: a pale ale from Bizarre Brewing (“bright, hoppy, very refreshing”) and summertime pilsners from Cloudburst Brewing and Chuckanut up in Bellingham. His taste has evolved. But not too much. “For my yardwork, I hydrate myself with Coors Light.”