Another Friday, another sad closing announcement for a local brewery.

This time around, B2B Garden Brewery was the one sharing an abrupt, final farewell on Facebook. It followed in the footsteps of Lava Rock closing on a Friday in December.

The brewery shared this message:

Dear B2B Garden Brewery Community,
We’re sad to announce that after over 10 years, we are closing our doors. We want to thank all of you for your support and for the great times we’ve shared.
You’ve made our brewery a special place, and we’re grateful for every moment. Although we’re saying goodbye, the memories we’ve created together will always be cherished.
Thank you for being part of our journey.

We took a tour of the space and met head brewer Julian Nunez back in July 2020. They had not even had the chance to open the location when COVID hit and the state went into lockdown.

That surely did not help the brewery get off to a great start. It was also a bit of an odd location at 8338 Comanche Rd NE, a half-block west of Wyoming, hidden from the busier street by the building that still houses Poki Poki (which itself lost a tenant recently when Kamikaze Kitchen closed).

Still, it was a comfortable spot, the last survivor among what was once three different B2B locations. The original hamburger-centered space in Nob Hill eventually closed up shop after the pandemic lockdown. The Garden Brewery was deemed too close to the taco-centered taproom near Uptown, so that spot was closed, with the food menu moving to the brewery.

B2B also endured an unlucky moment with crime, right around the same time as Quarter Celtic in the fall of 2021. Whether or not it faced additional instances of vandalism is unknown, but Kamikaze did cite that as one of the reasons it closed.

In the end, though, it was likely just an economic decision, as these often are with breweries when they have reached the end of the line. Though B2B was never a major player in the beer scene, it still had its place, and its closure does mean some good folks are out of work now, which is always a bummer.

Hopefully this is the last closure of 2024, but we have all read the national stories about the drop in beer sales and production across the country. Albuquerque and New Mexico are hardly immune to national trends, good and bad, so it may just be that a few places will not make it through this current downturn. We can always hold out hope, though, that the rest of the breweries will continue on and stay in business.

To all those who worked at B2B, we wish you good luck, and to all the fans of that brewery, we can only hope you will move your patronage to other places around town.

Keep supporting local, now more than ever!

— Stoutmeister