The supply store at the heart of the city’s homebrew scene
Inside the apex of Santa Fe’s avid DIY beer brewing community — the city’s lone supply store
Once upon a time, people made their alcohol at home. Yes, there were pubs and monasteries where one could get house-brewed beer, and the rich could import casks of fine wine or bottles of spirits, but for regular folks, it was totally normal to brew your beer and wine at home while you baked your bread and smoked your bacon. Now, even beer brewing has taken on a rarified air, and has become something artisanal, sometimes Byzantine, with codes and jargon and rightness and wrongness. People forget that this is totally something they can do themselves — much more easily now, as Santa Fe, once again, has a homebrewers supply store.
The Brew Makers Xperience is co-owned by friends Clyde Ellis, Duke Bradley and Gabe Noriega, who seem to be enjoying themselves as much as they are figuring out their hours, their clients’ needs and how to brew the perfect saison.
The location is tucked away on Chamisa Street behind Toyota of Santa Fe on St. Michael’s Drive and is definitely, as Ellis puts it, “a small ma and pop shop” with bins of grain and malt, packets of premade wort, and fridges of yeast and hops tucked away in various backrooms of a space with absolutely zero retail charm, but is thus imbued with the kind of no-nonsense utilitarianism that draws people to homebrewing in the first place. And it has practically everything most homebrewers need, which is good, because it’s the only homebrewing supply store between here and Colorado Springs, Colo., according to Noriega (and the internet). This makes the store, by necessity, a central hub of Santa Fe’s avid homebrewing community, as well as its lifeline. Ellis sometimes gets phone calls at night from desperate homebrewers who, for example, sterilized their equipment, prepped their mash, and then realized they were out of yeast.
“It’s been a juggling act to keep everything in stock for them,” Ellis says. “Some of these guys have big home breweries.”
Ellis, Bradley and Noriega bought the business from former Homebrewers Supply
owner Jami Nordby when he closed in 2016 and became the brewer at Rowley Farmhouse Ales. The Brew Makers Xperience has only been open for six months, and the owners all have regular day jobs — none of them in the brewing, or even food, industries. Ellis is a machinist by trade from Detroit, who moved to Santa Fe at what he calls “the turn of the century” (meaning 2000). Bradley is a mechanic; Noriega is a courier. And Bradley and Noriega are avid BMX bike riders — hence the shop name (and the dropped “e”).
Interestingly, Ellis, Bradley and Noriega are not themselves longtime homebrewers. In fact, Ellis only made his first beer a year ago, when he was given a one-gallon IPA kit as a Christmas gift by a friend, who perhaps thought Ellis’ enthusiasm for cooking and sausage-making made him a good candidate for homebrewing.
“We made it in January of 2016 and drank it in February,” Ellis says. “I went down to the [homebrewing] store and wanted more, and the guy said, ‘Why don’t you just get stuff to make 5 gallons?’ Now I’ve got so much equipment in my house you can come into my kitchen and pull taps.”
Since that first IPA, Ellis, Bradley and Noriega have been actively brewing beer after beer, style after style, and furiously Googling any answers they don’t yet know offhand — which with homebrewers can get esoteric. Beer trends currently lean toward lambics (wild yeast Belgian beers) saisons and seasonals, and now soured beers, with the possible future trend of smoked beers looming on the horizon.
“It gets crazy,” Ellis says. “We bit off more than we could chew. … For all three of us it’s been a huge learning curve.”
And of course, beer isn’t the only thing that Santa Feans brew. The Brew Makers Xperience is also there for you winemakers, cider brewers, picklers and even you fermenters of cheese. They don’t have SCOBYs (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), but they certainly have carboys for those who make their own kombucha. And they’re happy to do special orders.
With all those eclectic customers come a lot of eclectic questions, and at this point, the owners of the Brew Makers Xperience — Ellis in particular — have a surprisingly large knowledge base for a bunch of self-described hobbyists who haven’t been at it very long. Ellis waxes enthusiastic when talking about everything from hops, malts (which he will encourage you to taste) and obscure saliva-fermented brews from South America, and refreshingly seems to like being given questions he doesn’t know the answers to — yet.
And Ellis has an open mind to all things brewed. After all, he also keeps a few cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the shop fridge, one of which he sipped during the interview.
“It’s a lawnmower beer,” he smiles.