Pulling out all the stops at 30
Santa Fe Brewing Co. marks milestone year with Brakeroom — featuring 17 taps, upscale take-out
Thirty is a good age — you don’t have wrinkles yet, but you’re more interesting to talk to than you were in your 20s. Santa Fe’s original and oldest brewery, Santa Fe Brewing Co., hits that milestone this year and finds itself Santa Fe’s biggest brewery as well. But Santa Fe Brewing Co. owner Brian Lock has had beer in his blood nearly his whole life. He grew up in Portland, Ore., a hotbed of American craft beer, and during his sophomore year of high school, he started dabbling in home brewing (don’t do the math on that).
“I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up,” he said. “I want to start a brewery.”
The Santa Fe Brewing Co. actually was founded by Mike Levis in Galisteo in 1988 as a wee operation churning out craft beer before craft beer was a thing. Lock and three business partners bought the brewery in 1996 and moved operations to a slightly larger facility on Dinosaur Trail south of the city.
“We put in a more sophisticated brewhouse, from a threebarrel to a 15-barrel, fabricated for one of my partners out of dairy tanks,” he says. “There were four of us doing everything — brewing, bottling, selling. I was doing sales. I literally drove to the accounts, sold the beer, took the keg to that account, cleaned the line and wrote up the next order.”
They brewed on those until Lock (who bought out his three partners in 2003) finished construction on the new warehouse and brewery on Fire Place in 2005, a big-boy, 30-barrel system where they produce the thousands of cans and kegs they wholesale each year — an ever-growing pile of brews.
“I’m of the opinion it’s better to take small steps and slowly grow the brand,” Lock says. “But we’re just now looking at the growth we’re experiencing this year, and we’re up 50 percent.”
Some of the recipes — the Chickenkiller Barleywine and the Santa Fe Pale Ale — date to the original 1988 brewery. While the Chickenkiller is a bit of an acquired taste (you can find it in bottles in most local beer cases), the pale ale is a behemoth, synonymous in this town with “having a brew.”
“That beer has seen a little bit of modification, but all in all, those two recipes are fundamentally the same,” Lock says. “Back then, craft beer wasn’t as in demand as it is now, so people didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to us. It was a lot harder to sell then.”
Since then, Santa Fe Brewing Co. has opened up its taps to a whole panoply of flagship beers, like the 7K IPA (which, along with the Happy Camper IPA is, according to Lock, is one of the top-selling IPAs in New Mexico) and its Nut Brown Ale. In keeping with ever-changing beer trends, it offers frequent seasonals, like the Twisted Root, made with ginger and lemongrass, and the Sunsetter, a farmhouse-style beer with lime and agave (coming out in June).
Santa Fe Brewing Co. also has expanded its flight of taprooms, with locations in Albuquerque and Eldorado. It’s also expanding the Fire Place venue, home to the original taproom and the events-only Bridge, with a new taproom being built that will connect the two existing parts and a massive beer garden. Lock hopes to open it by the end of the year.
In the meantime, Santa Fe Brewing Co. celebrated its 30th birthday by getting a place downtown. The new taproom, The Brakeroom, brings the brewery back to Galisteo — Galisteo Street, that is, in the space that formerly housed a private cigar club. The name is a nod to the building’s former use — the row of distinctly non-Santa Fe brick buildings originally housed railroad men. The one The Brakeroom occupies was, according to Lock, for brakemen tasked with slowing down the trains whenever they needed slowing down (hence the large number of entry doors in such a small space — one for each of the tiny original bedrooms).
The Brakeroom has 17 taps — featuring nearly every beer Santa Fe Brewing Co. makes — plus a guest tap. The renovated space has the intimate vibe of an old-fashioned pub, with built-in patina to spare, full of dark wood and blue velvet-flocked wallpaper, tony enough for a date but casual enough for a weekday drink with friends while wearing cargo shorts.
The food, however, is decidedly upscale, with a custom menu from Restaurant Martín next door, including a truffled orzo mac and cheese ($6 for a single-size portion), as well as a suite of sandwiches and small plates. Patrons call over to Restaurant Martín, and servers bring food over as a to-go order — the perfect compromise between being a grownup with a distinguished palate and wanting to eat out of a carton, appropriate for those of us who also are in our 30s.