Back before the pandemic, Albuquerque the Magazine used to roll out an annual brewery passport, a printed little guide to all the local places where you could get a stamp and a discount.

Nowadays, though, paper is out, digital is in, and the result is Beers of the City. This new app/website is now available online, so we met up with ATM publisher Larryl Lynch to learn more about it.

“The brewery passport was the genesis of this,” he said. “What it taught us was that local craft beer drinkers are completely loyal and love the whole genre of fresh, locally made beer.”

Lynch said it always used to surprise him how many of those passport booklets used to be returned with every stamp in place. It helped form the idea of doing a digital version. Lynch said that when he initially reached out to representatives from the New Mexico Brewers Guild board of directors, he learned that while every place had their loyal customers, they wanted to expand their customer base by adding the loyalists from other breweries near and far to their own ranks.

So far, Lynch said that 24 breweries and beer bars have signed up, covering 29 total locations. That includes the Westside (Unhinged), Rio Rancho (Brew Lab 101), Corrales (Calavida Cantina, Ex Novo), Los Ranchos (Hops Brewery), Cedar Crest (Rumor), Northeast Heights (Alien Brewpub, Flatiron Bites & Brews, Starr Brothers, The Tatted Bee), I-25 corridor (Nexus), Southeast (Differential, Flock of Moons, High and Dry, Quarter Celtic, The 377), Downtown (Sidetrack, Thirsty Eye), Wells Park (Dripline), JUNO, Painted Lady, Rio Bravo), and Sawmill District/Old Town (Outpost 1706, Ponderosa).

“The brewers that signed up just signed up on faith of the magazine and the way that we do business,” Lynch said. “It’s not really yet a proven concept. When we’ll know that it’s a successful and viable concept that works is when we get to 500, 700, 1000 members, and then we have that critical mass. Then the program can really flex itself for the brewers, they can see people coming in. They can do things like push notifications. They can swap out their coupons.”

Currently, every participant will have two half-off pint coupons per month. Each comes with a little code for the server/bartender to input into their system. Once those are used, they are gone until the next month.

“So it’s $8 for members and it auto-renews every month,” Lynch said. “The coupons auto-renew. So I signed up on (July 8), so on August 8 those coupons that were blanked out will auto-renew, so I can use them again next month.”

Breweries can also add more coupons for free appetizers, discounted food, or whatever else they feel like.

“The cool thing is it’s very nimble,” Lynch said. “We can change anything on the fly. Probably in about another month and a half we’ll turn the keys over to the do-it-yourself side for the brewers to make those changes. For now, they’re all going through me. They can call me and say they want to change this.”

A user of the site could thus do a mini-pub crawl, getting half off one pint at three breweries (beyond that, please use a rideshare or talk that friend/family member into being a designated driver), with additional potential discounts for food or other items at those three breweries. One could do a crawl among the Wells Park breweries, for instance. You could then do it again the next month, or go use your half-off-pints coupons at another brewery you’ve never visited or haven’t been to in a long time.

Lynch said the magazine is open to any and all feedback/constructive criticism from beer lovers and breweries. He noted that several of the larger packaging-and-distribution breweries (La Cumbre, Marble, Santa Fe) are taking a wait-and-see approach before signing up. Patrons can cancel at any time if you are not frequently going out to make the $8 per month worth it.

In this day and age, whatever encourages people to get out and visit more breweries is something we can get behind, so long as it is fair to the customer and to the breweries involved. So far, so good, but if there is anything all of you out there would like to share about Beers of the City, you can message us, too, and we will do our best to respond or forward it over to the magazine.

A big thanks to Larryl for inviting us over to chat and see how this new site is going to work.

Keep supporting local!

— Stoutmeister