Albuquerque Beer: Duke City History on Tap

Author

Preface

Just about any history book, even on a subject such as craft beer, requires a group effort to complete. I have many people to thank for their help with this book, first and foremost being my acquisitions editor at The History Press, Candice Lawrence. Her patience alone was a tremendous help in my first writing endeavor of this nature.

Retired brewers Mike Carver of Cabezon Brewing and Brad Kraus of Rio Bravo Restaurant Brewery deserve special thanks, as they were gracious enough to take the time to sit down and talk about their experiences in the 1990s.

There are so many people to thank from the list of active breweries, including those who sat down for extended interviews about the scene: Mike Campbell of Drafty Kilt/Cazuela’s/Tractor, Doug Cochran of Canteen/Il Vicino/Kellys, John Gozigian of the NM Brewers Guild/Marble/Chama River/Blue Corn, Daniel Jaramillo of La Cumbre/Marble/Blue Corn/Assets/Bavarian Lager Cellar/Rio Bravo, Mark Matheson of Kaktus/Turtle Mountain/Assets, Brady McKeown of Quarter Celtic/Canteen/Il Vicino, Nico Ortiz of Turtle Mountain, Ted Rice of Marble/Chama River/Blue Corn and Rich Weber of Sierra Blanca.

Beyond them, a big thanks to all the folks who have been willing to sit down for multiple interviews with the Dark Side Brew Crew over the years, including James Warren of Santa Fe Dining/Blue Corn; John Bullard, Gabe Jensen, Jotham Michnovicz and Tim Woodward of Bosque; Kevin Davis, Justin Hamilton and David Kim of Boxing Bear; Matt Simonds of Broken Trail; Zach Guilmette of Canteen; Andrew Krosche of Chama River; Angelo Orona of Craft King Consulting; Todd Yocham of Duel; Dana Koller and Michael Waddy of Kaktus; Jeff Erway of La Cumbre; Leah Black, Barbie Gonzalez, Anna Kornke and Josh Trujillo of Marble; Ken Carson and Kaylynn McKnight of Nexus; David Facey and Ror McKeown of Quarter Celtic; Matt Biggs, Jeff Hart, Wayne Martinez and Rob Stroud of Red Door; Ty Levis and John Seabrooks of Rio Bravo; Bert Boyce, Alana Jones, Brian Lock, Monica Mondragon and Silas Sims of Santa Fe; Rod Tweet of Second Street; Dan Herr of Sidetrack; John Starr and Rob Whitlock of Starr Brothers; Josh Campbell, Carlos Contreras, Skye Devore, Nicole Duke, David Hargis, Jeremy Kinter, Melissa Martinez and Lauren Poole of Tractor; and Mick Hahn of Turtle Mountain, plus many, many more.

Additionally, there were many folks who helped, in big ways and small, with the completion of this book, from gathering images to offering up little pieces of advice and information along the way, including the photographerextraordinaire duo of Mario Caldwell and John Campi, plus Adam Galarneau, Stan Hieronymus and Jon Stott.

Of course, I never would have even been considered for writing this book were it not for the friends with whom I started the NM Dark Side Brew Crew back in 2012. To Derek Bensonhaver, Jon Kidd, Franz Sturm, Erik Teixeira and Brandon Trujillo, you all deserve a lot of credit for this book’s existence as well. The website has since added many great writers and friends, including Adam Auden, Kristin Elliott, Luke Macias, Reid Rivenburgh and more. I should also add that the website was inspired by the work of Patrick Cavanaugh, the original ABQ Beer Geek, who continues to be one of many passionate beer lovers who are the lifeblood of our little community.

A final set of thank-yous goes to my parents, David and Joanne Jackson, who have put up with all this writing nonsense, and sometimes even encouraged it, for many years. Also, thank you to just a few of the key people who have helped me keep writing over the years, including Todd Bailey, Craig Degel, Paige Galvin, Randy Harrison, Jim Johnson, Mike Robertson and Mark Woodhams.

Finally, to my late friend Vince Malesich, who died in 1995 and told me way back then that I would definitely write a book someday, thank you. I am glad you were right.

Prologue

Dude, what’s on tap?

It was this question, or something similar, that basically launched my career as a beer writer. I had been a sportswriter since graduating from college, at least until the newspaper industry endured a yearlong implosion in 2008. After moving back to my hometown of Albuquerque from Southern California at the end of the year, I found myself drifting in life and in career.

I had already become a craft beer fan from my time in the Los Angeles area, but back then, all I knew about beer in New Mexico was from places like Chama River and Turtle Mountain in Rio Rancho, brewpubs where one could get a bite to eat along with a pour of stout or red ale. Santa Fe and Sierra Blanca beers could be found in six-packs around town.

Then I visited a downtown dive bar, Burt’s Tiki Lounge, to watch local music, noticing two unusual tap handles. They were solid white with colored marble-like balls at the top, one red and the other green. The bartender said they were from the aptly named Marble Brewery, which had just opened a few months earlier a few blocks north of downtown.

By 2011, the dive bars and music clubs were no longer the primary hangouts for me and my friends. Instead, we had migrated to the many brewery taprooms popping up around town. When our friend Franz announced that he was getting married in September, a group of friends called on me, of all people, to plan out his bachelor party. Rather than an old-fashioned pub crawl, we elected to do a brewery crawl. It required a designated driver and an oversized vehicle, but in the end, I was able to map out a plan to hit eight of the nine breweries in the metro area at that time.

We started at Turtle Mountain and then went to Hallenbrick, Nexus, Il Vicino Canteen, La Cumbre and Marble. By that point, the groom-to-be was past the point of coherence, and others were in even worse shape. We abandoned our plans to visit the Chama River Microbar and the Tractor Nob Hill Taproom.

A short time later, one of the group noted that if we had known in advance what specialty/seasonal beers were on tap, we might have skipped one of the places we visited and gone to one that we missed. Information on the available beers was scarce. Few of the breweries were taking advantage of social media the way they do now. Their individual websites were primitive at best, infrequently updated and usually just armed with information on their core or house beers, those available year-round. The local media, print, television and online sources ignored the burgeoning craft scene for the most part.

Rather than simply rue that gap of information, one of our group, Jon Kidd, made a simple suggestion: why don’t we start our own beer news website? After a few months of procrastination following Franz’s wedding in September, we decided to move forward at year’s end. It would be a group effort, using our different palates and different perspectives to speak to the growing craft beer community. We would focus mainly on reporting what was going on rather than just offering up our opinions on things. All the site needed was a name.

On New Year’s Eve, or what was by then technically New Year’s Day, I was ruminating over a growler of Tractor’s PTO Smoked Porter in a friend’s backyard around a dying fire. Our group could just about agree on only two things: one, we all generally liked the darker beer styles such as porters and stouts; and two, we were all a bunch of metalheads. Staring into the night sky, I came up with Dark Side Brew Crew as a name for our motley collective and, potentially, the website. Jon agreed with the choice, and after we slapped an NM in front of it to designate our whereabouts, the website nmdarksidebrewcrew.com was launched on January 5, 2012.

Our handful of scattered stories early on were read by about twenty to twenty-five people apiece. They were mostly friends and family. None of us had any real idea of how to grow the site, other than to keep sharing its Facebook page with more and more people.

Over time, many of us had become known to the staffs at our local breweries and taprooms. One afternoon, I walked into Tractor Nob Hill and was greeted by beertender Lauren Poole, who said that she had a story for us. A city official had casually informed Tractor that it was illegal to sell growlers of beer due to a long-forgotten Nob Hill ordinance. This came more than six months after the taproom had opened. After a little research, I translated the legalese of the Nob Hill Sector Redevelopment Plan and explained on our site what was happening. Tractor shared the story on its Facebook page, and overnight our audience increased tenfold.

Since then, the website has taken on a life of its own. It has surpassed 100,000 views annually. The Crew, with myself as editor based on my previous journalism experience, has visited and reported on almost every brewery in New Mexico. As most of us are based out of Albuquerque, we have been mainly focused here, reporting on the rapid and seemingly unstoppable growth of our local beer scene. We have interviewed the brewers and owners, broken news stories and generally done our best to shape how information flows from the breweries to the general public.

By 2016, I found myself as a credentialed reporter covering the Great American Beer Festival in Denver in October. I broke the news that Boxing Bear Brewing had earned the Mid-Size Brewpub of the Year Award after a clerical error had initially given the honor to another brewery.

Some time before, I was contacted by The History Press to follow up on Jon C. Stott’s book, New Mexico Beer, with a new history book focusing solely on Albuquerque. This book is the result of months of research, interviews and a seemingly never-ending hunt for photographs, new and old. All of this has been born out of my love for craft beer, the community it has created, the jobs and other industries it supports and how it has shone a bright light on my beleaguered hometown, where good news has been hard to come by in recent years.

There were nine active breweries in the Albuquerque Metro Area in 2011. Just five years later, there are thirty-two, with two of them now producing more than ten thousand barrels per year and even distributing out of state. State records show that another six breweries have applied for small brewer licenses, all with the hope to open by the end of 2016 or some time in 2017—and rumors persist about another half-dozen beyond those.

Craft beer is booming in Albuquerque. It has come a long way since I started writing about it. It has come even further from its original roots in the nineteenth century.

The Beginning

BEFORE AND AFTER PROHIBITION, 1890–1940

Albuquerque is now the largest city in New Mexico, with its metropolitan population of 907,301 accounting for more than 40 percent of the state’s entire population. It was not always this way.

When the railroad arrived in Albuquerque in 1880, the United States Census showed a total of just 2,315 residents. It was not a surprise, then, that the business of brewing beer commercially was slow to arrive in the Duke City.

Prior to the railroad, getting beer to Albuquerque, or anywhere in New Mexico, was impossible. Transporting beer by horse-drawn wagon was improbable at best, ludicrous at worst. Without any local supply of barley or hops growing in the state’s arid climate, acquiring local ingredients was impossible as well.

The arrival of the railroad, at the very least, brought some of those ingredients to the small but growing town. The first brewing operations were likely similar to what people have today when home brewing—just a few pots and kettles to make beer in the back of the saloon or restaurant. Repurposed dairy equipment was typically used in the creation of beer, much of it by German immigrants who had flooded into the Midwest in prior decades, creating huge breweries that still exist to this day, such as Miller, Pabst and Anheuser-Busch.

Records show that there were at least two breweries in Albuquerque in 1882. No names were listed for these small establishments, which were a source of debate among town leaders concerning the growing saloon presence in the New Town area closer to the train tracks.

Brewing in Albuquerque never really began