There’s never been a time in my life when I couldn’t duck out for a pint on a patio somewhere with some shade and maybe a light breeze, and this afternoon is no exception – I’m sitting in the expansive outdoor area of Flock of Moons brewing in Albuquerque, one of the most-recommended microbreweries in town. The venue alone makes this a sure bet, and the beer is worth a try, too. Tall logo’d and etched glasses present the beer properly, and there’s space for a back-in food cart and a band. What’s not to like about a place like this?
Researching Albuquerque’s brew scene, I’ve become almost overwhelmed by the number of nanobreweries spread out across town. It’s not just that, but there’s already a strong writing subculture in the brew scene that covers a bunch of different aspects, most notably an active list of new beers every week, and some attempt at covering events and festivals. That there exists a need to do these things at all serves to outline the overall ABQ brew scene. There’s an ‘annual’ brewfest coming up, and this would have been ABQ Brew Week, apparently, but it was ‘canceled'(?) at the last moment.
Anyways, there’s a ton of smaller operations all over town, and I’m uncertain about how to proceed. i could easily get caught up doing profiles of the bigger breweries, while treading new ground the whole time. I could also try and focus on the smaller places, tracking down the tiny garage-based taprooms and stories that follow. My options are wide open, and I’m the only one here making decisions, so I’m at my own mercy.
Solo propaganda
The fact that I do most of this entirely by myself should be pretty obvious here. I read someone once criticize my writing as ‘stream of consciousness’ (I had said something about how their blog was literally just compiling news articles about local Portland breweries without any context or commentary on any of it) and that’s a fair point, except I’ve openly stated time and again that this is a blog about my personal journey through life, centered around beer. I can’t help but be interested in the stories and challenges that these owners have overcome, and the impacts they have on their local neighborhoods and markets, often through sheer force of will. I made it more than just a hobby by choice, by spending money on a domain name and hosting and the other crap that goes along with it, just so I could post my own personal thoughts about beer to the public. I’ve met several other people who claimed to be interested in becoming a ‘beer influencer’ but they couldn’t be bothered to get a decent email address. Oy.
Breaking Beer
Of course, there’s a weird cultural hangover for the things that most of the rest of the world know ABQ by – you won’t find a lot of places working the angles pop culture provides. Most of ABQ is too proud to bend to that sort of promotional bullshit, it seems. It’ll wear the t-shirt, sure, but only the one with the back logo. Yeah, the black one.
That said, the ideal of the renegade brewer still exists down here – it’s hard not to think of yourself as a renegade when you’re the only brewery in a 100 mile radius and none of the old-guard city council types want to grant you the license you need to actually open. Most of the state is desert-like and hostile to human life, so basically anything one does down here is based on rebellion against the natural order. Sadly (for the dreamers), the ideal runs into the practical, and many of the brewers often have business partners that demand some sort of reasonable approach – and financial return – to the business. It’s pretty easy to spot the renegades – they’re in the back brewing awesome beer, while the financial guy works at the bar in front, laptop in tow wherever they go.
Flock of Moons is one of those places, with an investor, and a brewer, and some combination of shared interests and financial responsibility dictating the overall approach. They have an absolutely killer location for business, lots of space on-premise to hold butts drinking beers – and no apparent interest in expanding outside of that. It’s extrodinary to find the right combination of factors to make this operation feasible, but location and initial capital funds make a huge deal. Albuquerque has a lot of under-developed neighborhoods and spaces that offer great opportunities, but only if you’ve got the money to turn vision into reality. FoM found a great under-used space not far from the university that has few direct neighbors (business or residential) and it’ll have a huge impact over the next few years in dictating their actual sales and individual customer retention. I suspect they will also have a huge impact on the surrounding neighborhood, as well.
Toasty Roasty
I’m writing this on Memorial day weekend, the Friday of, and I’m forgetting something important – the weather. Last year, ABQ had several weeks straight where the temperature never dropped below 90 degrees, not even at night. This presents a serious complication for small businesses that rely on physical throughput to generate sales. It’s in the mid-80s right now where I’m sitting, with some nice shade and a warm breeze keeping things fresh. Add another 10 degrees to that, though, and I’m looking for more conditioned drinking space. I sure as shit won’t be sitting outside at this location at (4pm) in mid-July if the usual summer temperatures are here. If I’m running a business that relies on the literal number of people willing to visit and stay at my establishment, I want to provide the largest comfortable space I can for the widest array of conditions, and FoM isn’t doing great in that capacity – a rainy day will wipe out their overall potential. But they’ll kill it during the months when it’s not physically uncomfortable to be outside. I could also be underestimating the will of the average Burqueno and their tolerance for weather that would make most people wilt.
On the Hunt
I spent some of the day searching for the mythical bottle shop that I am already certain does not exist here. I went to a place called Jubilation, and they’re focused on wine, booze and a small selection of local and nation-wide craft beer. If I wanted Sierra Nevada, for instance, and couldn’t find it (for some reason) at the local grocery store, they had the whole selection of Torpedo variants. Or Voodoo Ranger. There was a handful of other colorado beers, some Cali-based macro-craft, and honestly…not shit else. The local breweries were represented, but the cooler looked like the doors at the local breweries – selection was limited in some cases, and there wasn’t anything that grabbed my attention. No special releases, nothing seasonal, nothing to get my interest. It’s a tough day when you’re looking for something new to drink, and there’s only a few options on the shelf worth considering.
If you haven’t been keeping up, New Mexico has some unfortunate restrictions on distribution that keeps local craft beer off the shelves of local retail stores. These restrictions have stifled the sales of smaller breweries, with many owners deciding before opening day that they’ll avoid the hassle of distro and try to make ends meet by selling enough beer at the taproom to pay everyone. It’s a risky gamble, and unless you’ve got a space like FoM, you can easily run into trouble. If you’ve got a small taproom, there’s only so much you can sell to pay them bills. If you’re not trying to sell out of your taproom, you’ve still got to build your reputation somehow, enough to get people to look for your beer in the few places it might be found. Maybe you can get your beer on tap at a bunch of local restaurants, or contract brew for another small brewery to make ends meet. These calculations are complex, and vary from brewer to brewer, but it’s easy to find examples in ABQ.
Turnover
There have been some closures and even as I type this, things are changing on the local brew front. One longtime staple in the area was Blue Corn, a strange multi-faceted operation that brewed beer and operated a few food halls, and while they’re still open, they’ve recently announced that they will no longer be brewing beer. Apparently, this was one of those places that started a lot of careers in the local industry. My most recent experiences there were more than a decade ago, so I can’t really comment on the recent changes they had made, but it’s an easy example of how things continue to change here. I don’t think they were struggling because of their focus on beer, honestly, but the food and beverage industry is incredibly complex, and when you get large investors involved, you’re often under pressure to drop the most inefficient part of your business, and brewing is even more labor intensive than running a trendy kitchen. Apparently.
It’s strange to talk about it, but Ex Novo’s transition down here is another example of how the markets work. They’re doing very well, according to everything I’ve seen, with a large downtown expansion well underway (Still delayed as of July 15). Their move from Portland is a fading vision in the rearview, and they’ve built a fairly strong reputation and community here, all the while leaving behind everything they’d built in Oregon as another brand (Lazy Days Brewing). I’d wager they’re one of less than 5 breweries who’ve managed to make such a move, but it’s hard to track stuff like this unless you’re tuned in to each regional scene. Only a few of the other breweries in New Mexico would garner that kind of attention, let alone the outside interest, if they decided to pick up and move to another state. Or would they? So few have made such a big move that it’s hard to even say. Some have tried making shorter moves, like Lava Rock Brewing, who are apparently headed to Moriarty, while Bosque Brewing has moved into their disused location on the westside.
The side on the West
On a basic level, Albuquerque is split down the middle by the Rio Grande, north-south, with the bulk of the city actually on the east side of the river, on the broad plain below the Sandia Mountains. The westside was developed much later, with less room between the river and the mesa proper – an impenetrable wall of black lava rock that spreads from the local volcanos. The result is that the westside is more suburban sprawl, with only a handful of commercial centers and the kind of retail centers that one would describe as ‘boxy’. There are only a few places that serve booze and no actual bars of note, that I can find, for several miles in any direction from my house. Seriously. As always, I feel like I might be missing some vital detail or hotspot of local debauchery, but I don’t know how far I’m actually willing to go to find out. I think there’s another brewery called Sobre Mesa (see my upcoming post) and the La Cumbre spot, anything else is beyond my knowledge. I shall remain on the hunt, though.
A while back, I lived here with my family on the Eastside, way up off Eubank and Constitution, not terribly far up the into foothills but getting close. Back then, the idea of taprooms opening up on the hill was new and exciting, and a few were planning on breaking ground on Eastside locations. I missed the decade-ish that it took for those locations to develop, but they have, and it makes the job of exploring ABQ’s brew scene even harder, because that’s the experience for many Burquenos – satellite taprooms and commercially developed locations that don’t exactly replicate the gritty feel of the OG brewery. It’s expensive and challenging to run multiple locations of any kind of business – some place that needs to get multiple levels of service licensing is, as you’d imagine, even moreso. You wouldn’t naturally be looking at multiple locations unless the economics made it the better bet, overall, than pushing hard on self-distribution and promotion.
And so it is here in ABQ that distribution is less appealing than running multiple locations. It’s definitely something I’ll have to look into. Until next time…I’ve been Jeff.