In 2022, Keeping Together’s Averie Swanson and Pat Fahey had just decided that the town they wanted to set down roots in and build their new brewery would be Santa Fe, New Mexico.

While searching for a good space that would serve as a brewhouse and taproom, Second Street Brewery’s original location at 1814 2nd Street had just come up for sale, and seemed to be a good fit.

“I had my first beer on that patio in 2010, maybe even 2008, in a previous pre-beer life,” Swanson recalled.

“When we took our trip out here in the summer of 2021, we drove in from Chicago, into town, and had a beer on the patio there,” Fahey said.

“That was the first time he was here,” Swanson added. “And, he said, ‘this place feels good.’”

For both of them, Second Street’s Oldery already had good memories attached. And now, it was quite coincidentally, an available restaurant/brewery space in town.

Still, Fahey and Swanson were not exactly looking to pounce.

“When it went up for sale, we wanted to be very delicate about how we would treat that space and pay honor to what Rod (Tweet) has done,” Fahey said.

“The Santa Fe beer scene wouldn’t be what it is without Second Street,” Swanson added.

“We eventually came to the conclusion that it could be a really great space,” Fahey said. “People already knew it as a brewery, and the city is already comfortable with it being a brewery.”

In June of ‘22, they begin working on acquiring the hallowed beer hall, but it took quite a while to get the initial pieces of financing, as well as a few other elements in place.

They went under contract on the “O.G.” in February 2023.

During the process, however, they discovered that there was a lot of work to be done, specifically referring to a ton of deferred maintenance. It was going to take them a lot more money just to bring it up to operating condition, let alone any future attempts to develop the space beyond that.

“The owner didn’t want to work with us on the timing, either,” Swanson said.

By April, the contract ended up falling apart.

“We needed more time with our loan to get things squared away, and the owner said ‘nope, I’ve got another buyer lined up,’” Swanson said.

At that point they weren’t sure what they were going to do. They needed to find another space. Thankfully, Swanson had kept an eye on the market and had never really stopped looking at other properties. That’s when she discovered a large plant nursery with an onsite warehouse space located on, believe it or not, Rufina Street.

“I didn’t know about the location,” Swanson admitted. “I already felt bad about following Rod around. I felt like, ‘Man! He’s just going to hate me!’ (laughs) Because there I was, in his old spot. Now, here I am again, two doors down. I didn’t know if it would work. It’s definitely a different vibe. It wasn’t already a brewery, but our broker brought us over here. It’s in the, air quotes, industrial part of town, which coming from Houston, where I was born and raised, and then Austin and Chicago, industrial in those cities means something different.

“But, when I got inside, it was something else. You can’t hear the noise from Cerrillos. It feels very secluded, like a little mirage oasis in the desert kind of feeling.”

After they visited the property with the broker, the vision of Keeping Together’s permanent home began to take shape. Swanson and Fahey were inspired.

“Having also been to so many different breweries, we knew right away that this would be a unique experience, which means a lot to us,” Swanson said.

“Regardless of where the brewery ended up, one of the cornerstones to what we wanted to do was to build a really unique space,” Fahey explained. “And, when we looked at this property, it was very clear that this could be a great canvas for an incredibly unique on-site experience. And, I think that that resonated with both of us right off the bat. We saw it on a Thursday and put in an offer the next day.”

For Keeping Together, the process has been hard and slow, due in part to decisions they’ve made along the way to keep both financial and creative control of the business.

“All of the financing that we’ve done has been through debt, which makes some things a lot harder. Assuming that we’re able to be successful here, I think it will ultimately be the right decision,” Fahey said.

With full creative control, they would be able to make decisions that would align with their values and be able to design a space that would align with their vision.

Most of the project has been financed through a U.S. Small Business Administration backed loan, but even that made closing on the property more challenging.

“We had to basically design the space before we closed on it,” Fahey said.

“So that’s a huge capital outlay with no guarantee that you’re even going to get the building, which was scary,” Swanson said.

“And stressful, because it had to happen really quickly,” Fahey added.

“The design process takes a long time for a normal building, or even a new build,” Swanson said. “It would have been way easier for us to bulldoze all of this stuff and just rebuild, but I didn’t want to do that, because it is such a cool story.”

From the beginning, Keeping Together wanted to keep the foundation of the site intact, ‘re-potting,’ rather than uprooting nearly 30 years of its history as Santa Fe Greenhouses, a destination plant nursery founded by David Salman, a horticulturalist of world renown.

By the time the design was approved, and they had closed on the building and loan, it was mid-December 2023.

The permitting process was slow, but not unusually so.

From the City of Santa Fe, there were a few hoops and loops to jump through, like needing traffic studies here, or access permits for curb-cuts there. Between coordinating everything with their traffic engineer, their city review, and their design professionals, they were able to resubmit all of their changes on paper by mid-July.

Eight months after they originally went in to submit (at the time of the interview), they still didn’t have the construction permits.

“All of that’s been going on in the background, while we were managing bids from the contractor we ended up going with, trying to shave some money off of the construction bid, trying to raise more money so that we could find some middle ground there, and then we got the terrible news,” Swanson said.

On June 5, Swanson and Fahey got an email from their brewhouse manufacturer informing them that he was closing his shop.

“He said there were some raw materials in there for us to pick up if we wanted it, but basically, none of the equipment was complete, and he didn’t even mention anything about whether we were getting our money back,” Swanson said.

Everything from the brewhouse, to fermenters and brites, hot and cold liquor tanks, to pumps, hoses, you name it, an entire brewing package they had already paid about 90 percent for was gone in an instant.

* * *

Stay tuned for part three, where we get into what’s being done, where we are now, and what the vision still is for the future space of Keeping Together.

To, well, keeping it together after news like that!

Cheers!

— Luke

From left: Luke, NM Brewer’s Guild Director Ebbie Edmonston, Averie Swanson, and Pat Fahey watching the 2022 World Cup final at Boxcar.