Stoutmeister here, finally starting up a mondo-sized recap of the NMDSBC’s trip out to Turtle Mountain last week. With E-Rock piloting and Shilling navigating, we trekked west on a rainy afternoon to go drink some beer and hopefully meet up with a member of the Turtle staff.

We ended up being greeted by the main man himself, owner Nico Ortiz. As he said right off the bat, “Grab some beers and come on back!” At this point we knew we were in for a very good night. Our gracious host ended up spending nearly two hours with us, showing us around the brewery, bringing us samples of beer, and talking about more subjects related to beer than we could count.

Actually, I could count, since I brought along the same trusty digital recorder I use to interview the Isotopes. Over one hour, 35 minutes worth of conversation was recorded. Since we talked about so many different subjects, I have gone ahead and split this post up. Parts two and three (if necessary) will be up soon.

So our night started with a full tour of Turtle’s brewing room, which you can see through the glass behind the bar.

Nico shared the story of how he came to purchase the stainless steel beer tanks and other equipment: “I bout these back in ’98 at an old brewery in Tucson. Another man’s bankruptcy is another man’s bread. Up in the foothills, at a resort, they opened a brewery. The general manager of the brewpub, his plan was to sell the beer to everyone at the resort. His problem was he was a jerk and pissed them off. He was in the resort, so he didn’t get a lot of people from Tucson to come up. He cut himself off from his main source of clientele. So he died. I think they were open 14 months. He bought the stuff brand new. He paid 250-grand for it. I bought it in bankruptcy for a lot less.”

The fact Nico was even aware that there was brewery equipment for sale was thanks to a stroke of luck. A brewer from Breckenridge was in Albuquerque and talked to Nico about the situation in Tucson, where at the time Breckenridge had a brewpub near the intersection of Campbell and River (yours truly was a U of A student at this time and may have stopped by the pub once or twice).

After storing the equipment for nine months, Nico opened Turtle Mountain back in 1999. The brewery opened in the location now occupied by its sister restaurant, Fat Squirrel Pub & Grille, but quickly outgrew that smaller space.

“It only came with these three 10-barrel fermenters, so we added to the three 20s,” Nico said. “Three 10-barrel fermenters is a real bottleneck. The reason we moved from the old place down the street to up here was simply because three 10s was not going to do it. We shoehorned everything into a tiny building that is now the Fat Squirrel. We needed to have excess fermentation. It came with eight serving tanks, but the problem is you can’t get the beer into the serving tanks because you need eight weeks.”

Nico showed us the grain room, where more malts and hops are kept than we could count. At some point in the year, the Turtle staff rounds up the leftovers and gets experimental.

“Usually about twice a year we do what’s called a Yard Sale Ale,” he explained. “We have a few pounds of this, a few pounds of that left over. So we just throw the (stuff) into the mash tun. Typically it’s anywhere from 12 to 15 kinds of grains. It’s never the same. We usually ferment it with an English yeast. It usually comes out to be a Newcastle-y Brown type of thing.”

That next batch of Yard Sale Ale will be ready in August or September, Nico said. Oh, darn, another reason to drive out to Turtle for the Crew.

Anyway, Nico showed us the new boiler, which replaced the original after it gave up the ghost after “13 or 14 years.” The new boiler did not come cheap — $12,000! — and Nico frequently reminded us that “if you want to succeed in this business you have to write BIG checks.”

Nico showed us the rest of the system in the back, with the advanced temperature controls and all of the other fun equipment that helps make all that tasty beer everybody was enjoying out in the main part of the building.

In a size comparison, Turtle is smaller than Il Vicino’s operation at the Canteen and far smaller than the state’s heavyweights, Marble and Santa Fe.

“(Our system) enables use to do 20 barrels of beer in 12 hours,” Nico said. “It’s not like the big guys in Santa Fe, where they quintuple brew. They’ve got five 120s. They were talking about brewing Monday to Thursday, brewing around the clock. We’re stable at about 1200 barrels. I look at one of their 120 barrel tanks and they’ve got six of them. I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s two-thirds of our (annual production).’”

Nico said Turtle is always brewing its three most popular beers — IPA, Red Rye and Mr. Hoover’s Steam.

“The thing about running a brewpub is the customers determine what you make,” he said. “If we make something I think is the greatest beer ever but it doesn’t sell we’re not making it anymore. We can’t sell English beers to save our souls, ESBs and things like that, people don’t buy them.”

That doesn’t keep Turtle’s brewing staff from branching out and trying new things.

“We’ve been experimenting with some of the new hops,” Nico said. “We use most of the classics. At some point we’ll be more cutting edge. I usually let Tom at Marble get them first, then I’ll go over and drink them and see what I like.”

Brewers Mark Matheson and Bill Krostag are responsible for running the show in the back, which makes Nico’s job even better.

“I hire professionals to do the job,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve got the world’s greatest job: I get to drink as much beer as I want but I don’t have to make it. I don’t have to clean or sanitize or mash or anything else. I just get to come in here and drink.”

It’s official, someone in the Crew needs to win the lottery and open a brewery so we can all have the greatest job in the world.

Coming up in part two: Nico discusses the history of brewing in New Mexico and gives us a history lesson on the IPA Challenge, which starts this Sunday at noon at Nexus Brewery!