All right, as we detailed last week, it is time for the opening round of our first brewery patio bracket challenge. This is all purely for fun, a way to celebrate our breweries and their efforts to maximize their patios during the current year.

We started with the breweries down south, where 575 Brewing of Alamogordo and Cloudcroft Brewing have piled up a ton of votes so far. After that, we split up the offsite taprooms of Albuquerque between those east and west of Interstate 25, and the results have been awfully close so far. Our third set of brackets covered both the breweries in the Albuquerque suburbs and those offsite taprooms located far from the state’s biggest city. The last pair of brackets outside the ABQ metro area focused on the northeast and northwest breweries, before we rolled into the city and tackled the breweries north of I-40. You can still vote in any of those polls if you have not already.

Today, things figure to get extra competitive as the Battle of Burque continues. For the most part, we used the two interstates as the dividing lines. We follow up with the breweries south of I-40 and then split those between west and east of I-25 (well, sort of, it was not an even split, so please read below to see how we ended up with eight and eight).

So, a few points we want to make before you all get to the voting:

• What makes a patio the best? That is entirely up to you. It can be the setup, the views, the size, the shade coverings, the staff on hand, or just the beer (and/or food) served there. There are no wrong answers or reasons, but if you want to leave a comment with the poll to tell us why a specific place is your favorite, please do so!
• We ask that everyone vote for a maximum of four brewery patios per poll. If there is only one or two or three you want to vote for, that is just fine. We will narrow these initial lists of eight patios per region down to four, then two, then one will advance to the final rounds.
• You are totally allowed to pick a place just based upon the photos we are providing (credit to each brewery for the photos that we did not have a good patio shot from, which is most of them), even if you have never been there. However, if you have friends or relatives that do not follow us, but live in one of these towns, please share the story links and let them have their say as well.

Polls for each region will be set up to last for one week worth of voting. If there is a tie for fourth place, we will either open it up to a tiebreaker poll, or the Crew will figure out a tiebreaker that is as fair as we can make it. The four highest vote totals per region will advance to the second round.

The bulk of the photos used here are from individual breweries’ social media pages, with a few archived photos from the Crew.

ABQ Southeast Breweries

So, yes, two of the breweries above are technically west of I-25, but we only had six to the east and 10 to the west, so in the end the final tiebreaker was seniority. Gravity Bound and Thirsty Eye are the two newest breweries, so they get shifted to this region. Like we have said before, this setup was never 100 percent perfect, but we did the best we could.

So which of the eight breweries in the (mostly) southeast region has the best patio? You make the call, either from personal experience/visits or the photos above.

ABQ Southwest (Downtown) Breweries

Only a couple of these breweries are technically in the SW postal code, but for our purposes, this is the southwest/downtown bracket, including breweries in Wells Park and the Sawmill District.

So which of the eight breweries in the southwest has the best patio? You make the call, either from personal experience/visits or the photos above.

The first round concludes with these regions. Good luck to all the breweries and to all the beer drinkers.

Next up: The second round begins as we revisit the breweries in Southeast and Southwest New Mexico.

Keep supporting local!

— Stoutmeister