That’s the tagline for one of my favorite beers from ABQ, one of the OG IPAs that popped up when there were still new hop profiles to entertain the tongue. Elevated has a big malt base with a rustic but dry hop profile. A nice thick head sticks around and a resinous finish lingers. It’s a clean beer with a lot of character, fairly approachable and refreshing, if you like this kind of IPA.
I’m enjoying a 22oz mug of this beer at a local burger joint, which sort of shows how much ABQ has grown overall, and in beer culture specifically. I’m less than a mile away from the La Cumbre Westside taproom, and I’ve got a bigger mug at a lower price point here, and it’s got food directly – the taproom doesn’t. It’s a unique feature of NM’s booze laws that there isn’t a requirement to serve food as well.
I’ve traveled to several places around the country exploring beer over the last 20+ years now, and it’s hard to express how complicated the booze laws in the U.S. are – they’re literally different state by state, and in some states different counties are able to enact different laws about alcohol, so every little town has a different twist on their drinking culture. Here in ABQ, it’s pretty open, with stores being able to sell liquor, beer and wine basically everywhere (in Oregon, hard liqour is only sold at dedicated booze stores, for instance). I haven’t yet explored the ‘specialty’ shops here, but there don’t appear to be any dedicated bottle shops or beer stores that stand out. There are plenty of small breweries here putting out decent beer, but they don’t seem to have any proper outlets for their best products. The Portland area had several dedicated beer stores, so I’m a bit curious as to why there aren’t any here.
I’m going to dig deeper on this, hopefully soon. My new life here gives me some free time to explore the things that intrigue me, and I’m looking forward to hearing from the local breweries on topics like distribution. One brewery on my list is Ex Novo, a recent transplant from Portland, where they had a solid reputation and their beer could be found in a wide area around PDX. I’d like to get a read on how they feel they’re doing since they moved. Before I left Oregon, I had lunch at Ex Novo’s old Beaverton location, which has re-branded to Lazy Days Brewing. I’m sure it’s a complicated story…I wonder if anyone wants to talk about it.
At any rate, i’ve got some work to do. Maybe I can help make Albuquerque the next big beer destination. I’ll have to ask the brewers about this water, though. This…stuff I get from the tap tastes awful. My last location on Mt Hood in Oregon provided me with incredible, super-clean water that you actually wanted to drink.
I understand it’s been a couple months since I was posting regularly, but I think I mentioned how sparse the selection was up there. Even if multiple trucks full of beer drove past the stores in Hood Village every week, you’d never know because they never stopped. It is truly the only drawback to the area I was in, as the rest of the area provided me with a lot of other happy distractions. I didn’t get out as much as I’d have liked, but I made good use of some trails near my little cabin, so I can feel good about how I used my time there, for the most part. Let’s just not talk about boozy Sundays and Nappy Mondays, mmm k?
I’m having a happy hour at Spinns Burgers, which has 5 or 6 local breweries on tap, with seasonals and a rotating menu – and it’s just a burger joint. With 22 oz mugs. Who am I to complain (much?)? I wrote a little about the differences between the various kinds of places you might find good beer – from the brewery taproom to the local bottle shop to a place like this, which is a restaurant with a surprisingly deep selection of taps. You’d never know this was a beer place if you weren’t paying attention, but they’re doing hard work for a half dozen local breweries on the DL. There’s a fairly sizeable outdoor patio – all covered – which is mostly empty on an afternoon happy hour. I’ve already made a few visits here, and I suspect I’ll be back.
Tomorrow I’m set to meet some old friends at a Boxing Bear location, which will be new to me, although I’ve been cozy with BBB since they opened next to a brew shop on the southern edge of Corrales. Back when I was brewing extract and partial-grain brews with my dad, they had the kits and supplies we needed to make the best of an afternoon on the patio, making a mess. Boxing Bear is another brewery with a great origin tale and lots of cred locally, and I’m excited to see how they’ve progressed since the last time I got to sample their beer in 2018. Moving forward, in fact, it should be noted that most of the breweries I visited last in late 2018 seem to be doing pretty well, but I’m not under any illusions that things have remained the same for any place I was at in the before-before.
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I’ve been working on this blog for 5 or 6 years now, off and on. It’s not much work, really, and it’s entirely personal in so many ways, but people always told me I should share my passion about beer somehow. I’ve believed (sometimes) that it’s possible to do this sort of thing for a living, and now I’m in a position where I don’t have to ‘do anything’ for a living but look after my elderly grandfather. I am acutely aware of the privilege of my situation, but also completely stressed out by the long-term commitment I’ve made to care for someone in cognitive decline. Over the last few weeks I’ve taken some time to put together a few more entries, but found myself trying to finish them a few days later while sitting at the La Cumbre westside taproom.
Not only are they my favorite brewery here, this location is open until midnight on the weekends, and 10 on weeknights. Captain Shuffles makes his way to bed while the sun is still up, but it’s nice to have a place that’s open a little later some nights in case I need some extra time to unwind, and it turns out they’re one of the only places in the area that’s open late, period. I’ve already joined the mug club and should probably start riding my bike down here, it’s close enough it wouldn’t be much effort for a former version of myself.
They’re everywhere
Not ten feet from where I’m sitting there’s a small placard bragging about how many recycled containers were re-purposed, for a little company called Paktech. If you’re a returning reader, you may remember the light grudge I’ve got against this company for their half-assed approach at making a truly recyclable product, and how they brag about being great but don’t share the details. As usual, there’s no real information about how or what was repurposed, or what that even means. I know from experience and research that they’re (maybe) talking about ‘collected’ 4- and 6-pack plastic beer toppers that almost universally hold craft beer cans together these days.
The problem is, they’re not really recyclable, unless you take them back to a dedicated collection point, which then has to gather and ship the things back to some facility in another state, where they’re properly recycled. What they really don’t advertise is that they’re basically trash outside of that, and they actually cause problems for legit plastic sorting at local facilities because they’re not supported, and they can cause problems for the sorting equipment. But they’re basically the go-to solution for packaging to-go cans, and you can’t argue that the design works. The price point beats cardboard packaging, and unless you’re really into marketing, the whole process of designing the packaging art is redundant if your can art is strong enough. It’s a solution that works…nevermind the details.
Some day I’ll dig deeper, maybe, or just let it lie, because I like not being banned from breweries for asking dumb questions. The problem is that it’s a dirty little secret for the entire industry, and when you see the congratulatory propaganda that keeps the dirty little secret clean, and you know the secret….well. I’ll just leave it there for now. Captain Shuffles has gotten into the cookies again, and I’ve got to hurry home and give him meds.