Squatting in the cold drizzle Tuesday morning, Dan Suarez fingered a little shoot of a plant that has managed, somehow, to rise for a second season from a tiny green patch of his parents’ backyard in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

By the end of the summer, he declared, he will be drinking the flower cone of that plant. “The king of herbs,” he said. “The hop.”

Dan Suarez grows hops in the backyard and brews beer in the basement. He experiments with beer-infused ice cream  malt walnut instead of maple walnut, for instance. When he had a job in one of the city’s premier cheese stores, he spent many hours musing on which brew would go best with the goat cheese (white beers, he says) or blue cheese (sweet stout, “a great mix of flavors, the salt and sweet like honey-roasted peanuts”).

“Beer is pretty much food,” he said.

Now, Mr. Suarez, 23, is in the running for one of the world’s most exotic summer internships: assistant to the chief beer officer for a major hotel chain.