Much of the time when we cover a story, it’s celebrating the happy times like a major achievement of a brewery — winning the IPA Challenge, bringing home a medal from GABF, or opening a new taproom. Sometimes we cover the tougher stories, too, the closing of a business, or the loss of someone dear to the industry. We also cover the worst side of the business, a brewery shutting its doors, with the staff left unpaid, unemployed, and in the dark.

We cover the local beer scene as comprehensively as possible, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The three-part feature story I’m about to tell is certainly filled with the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s a tale of a true love of craft beer, a couple pursuing their dream of opening a brewery, the tough process of seeing that dream through to reality, the bumps along the way, and one of the worst, most dream-squashing misfortunes to happen to a brewery just trying to get started. But, most of all, it’s about the perseverance of the human spirit, and why community is so important.

I hope you’ll stick around and get to know the new brewery that’s working very hard to open in Santa Fe, soon, yet certainly not soon enough.

The new brewery is called Keeping Together, and it will be owned and operated by a couple of wonderful people. They are real craft beer geeks, through and through, both with a deep love and respect for the art and science of brewing, with a ton of knowledge and experience between them to make what they do not only exceptional, but resonant and memorable.

I first met Averie Swanson and Pat Fahey by random chance one Sunday morning at a bar in downtown Santa Fe, when I asked my pal Ebbie Edmonston to join the crew to watch the World Cup Final. I had no idea who these new people were, or what they were doing in town at the time, but they looked familiar, like REALLY familiar, but that aside, they were a total blast to share the World Cup experience with that day.

Months later, I ran into them again, only by this time, I’d been informed by my little ravens that they were, in fact, the ones opening the next brewery in Santa Fe, and they just recently put in an offer on Second Street’s Oldery.

Though their modesty would suggest otherwise, they are quite well known in the craft beer industry, but if you haven’t yet had the pleasure of making their acquaintance, please allow me to introduce you to our new neighbors.

Averie Swanson’s background and degree are in biology. Both in and out of the classroom, she loved all things science. She started home brewing as a hobby after college, and decided that brewing was her jam. After applying to a couple graduate programs, she didn’t get into the one she really wanted in Austin, and so, still really into beer at this point, she sought out work in the brewing industry.

She reached out to all of the breweries in Austin to see if anyone was taking on volunteers and Jester King was the only one that got back to her.

Swanson volunteered at Jester King for six months before she asked for a full-time apprenticeship. She apprenticed for another six months, before they brought her on as a full-time brewer. She was there for six years and was even awarded some equity in the company. By the time she put in her notice to move in with her then long-distance partner, in Chicago, she had worn the titles of head brewer and production manager, among many others.

Pat Fahey also had a love for science, with a degree in chemistry. His true passion, however, has always been food and flavor.

Early on in his career, he was very enthusiastic about beer and began judging homebrew competitions, where he inevitably heard about the Cicerone program. In May 2011, he took the certified Cicerone exam and did very well on it. He did so well, in fact, that the people at the Cicerone program reached out to him and asked if he’d like a job grading, proctoring, and managing exam content; he would just have to move to Chicago.

He did just that, and in 2013, he took and passed the Master exam so that he could do more within the company.

“Initially, I just managed exam content for the first couple of levels. Once I passed the master exam, I managed the content for that as well, and then took over all our training and education, and then eventually our business development and development of any education materials that we put out. I guess you could say I’ve been into beer for a long time.”

During this time at Cicerone, he met Swanson when she took the master exam herself in 2015 (which of course, he had to recuse himself from her later attempts to pass it). But, pass it she did, to become one of 18 master Cicerones in the world.

They began dating and continued long distance for three years, until it was time for Swanson to make a change in her personal and professional life.

In 2018, Swanson moved to Chicago, where she took a much-needed sabbatical.

It wasn’t long, though, before she heard the call of the wild.

In 2019, she began consulting on the wild yeast program at Half Acre Beer Co.’s Lincoln Avenue brewery. During that time, Half Acre offered her some tank space to brew her own beer, a project which would eventually give birth to the brewery concept and brand, Keeping Together.

So what is Keeping Together? And, how did it come together, one might ask.

Swanson wasn’t always in the business to build a brewery. She liked making beer, and Half Acre gave her space to do that. To make things legit, Half Acre had hired Swanson on as an employee, so that she was covered by insurance to brew on their equipment. What eventually evolved from that was a unique business model that could start supporting the concept. Swanson and Half Acre even came up with a unique arrangement where they could split profits and print their own separate labels, all approved by the TTB.

It wasn’t contract brewing, and it was a bit different than alt prop per se, meaning Alternating Proprietorship.

Swanson’s unique arrangement with Half Acre made it possible for her brewery project to become, build, and maintain its own brand.

It just needed a name (and a mission statement).

“Pat and I were out at dinner at Lula in Chicago,” Swanson said. “And, I remember asking him if you were to try to come up with a name for a business, how would you even go about that? And, he said ‘Well, I would probably do some market research, see what people liked, what they wanted, what resonated, and I would go from there.’

“And, I was like, no! Absolutely not!” Swanson laughed. “I need the name to be something that is what the world needs, a mantra, some sort of resonant call-to-action.”

Swanson’s father, among some of his more eccentric callings, was a hypnotist. And, from him, Averie learned a bit about hypnotism, the power of neuro linguistic programming, but more importantly the importance of words to people.

“For me, the name needed to be something that was inspiring and needed to be something that was positive,” Swanson said. “At that time, the beer industry wasn’t in dire straits or anything like that, but I’d been in the industry for some time, and was noticing that there were a bunch of bullshit beer labels that looked like people were not being super intentional about their beer and what they were putting out there. And so, I wanted the name to have a little bit more intention, more meaning.”

Only a couple years later, during the pandemic, when a major illness kept threatening to keep us apart, the concept of keeping together seemed to be what the world needed most.

Keeping Together had become a solid brand by then. Swanson’s beer was becoming well known in the beer world. The arrangement with Half Acre was a decent solution to not owning a brewery, but it was not a permanent one.

Half Acre ended up selling the location where Swanson was making her beer, and so partially due to that, but for a multitude of other reasons, it was time to move on. Keeping Together had solidified into a strong enough brand by now, that it required and deserved its own brick and mortar establishment.

“After three years in Chicago and three years into the pandemic, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to live in Chicago anymore. There’s just no nature!” Swanson said.

The pair needed to find a new, more permanent home for their brewery, and so they set their sights on the Southwest because of the blue skies, the warmth, and of course, the all-important access to nature.

They first tried Arizona on for size because, being from Texas, Swanson liked the heat. They checked out brewery spaces in several places like Verde Valley, eventually setting their gaze on Sedona, where they would, amid the red sandstone rises, get engaged. But, as they sought out a good restaurant to celebrate their next big step, they began to realize that the flavor culture wasn’t half as rich as the soil. They knew it would be an uphill battle trying to sell the locals on the kind of beer they wanted to make, that being wild fermentation saisons and the like. And so, they looked just a few (hundred) highway miles up the road, at Santa Fe.

“Coming to New Mexico, it was just immediately apparent to me that agriculture and food and flavor have been such a huge part of the culture for eons,” Swanson said. “It’s a legacy I’m inspired to try to honor.”

“We came out here for a trip, and a lot of the things that weren’t working in Arizona, seemed like they would work here,” Fahey added.

In the high desert, they had found what they were looking for — a land with nature in their backyard, and a people that understood, and even celebrated flavor.

In 2022, they moved to Santa Fe and immediately began looking for a space to open their brewery.

It just so happened that another well-established brewery had, after 24 years, vacated one of their long-adored spaces on Second Street.

*  *  *

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for parts two and three, where you can find out what happened on Second Street, what terrible news halted the brewery in its tracks, and what Keeping Together’s vision is for the new brewery.

To our new neighbors and new beer friends!

Cheers!

— Luke