It was 12 years ago that a brewery opened over on Candelaria just west of I-25.

It will be this weekend or early next week when the last local piece of that brewery closes up for good.

The good old social media algorithm didn’t drop the news in our laps when it first appeared, but the news made its way to us eventually. The Red Door bar downtown was closing by the end of June, which happens to be this Tuesday. No definitive date of closing was listed, but it probably makes more sense to just turn out the lights one last time after this weekend.

Red Door Brewing will still exist out in Clovis. The downtown and bowling alley locations will go on, but it will no longer have any presence in Albuquerque where it all started back in 2014.

Change would often come fast for Red Door. The original ownership group dwindled from four to one pretty quickly. Within two years of opening the brewery, they added a taproom on the first floor of the Simms Building downtown at the corner of Gold and 4th Street.

That taproom would eventually relocate to Central, in the spot that formerly housed Blackbird Buvette. It came with a full liquor license, making it one of the first brewery offsite locations to be able to serve cocktails.

There would also, briefly, be a taproom in the Northeast Heights (the less said about that one, probably the better, for the brewery and the Crew). The first Clovis location would open, and then another location was in the works for Roswell.

But, really, the party was downtown. That Red Door became a home to many local musicians, poets, artists, and simply the regular folks who wanted nothing to do with the louder, rowdier bars. It was a refuge from the usual Central chaos on the weekend.

New head brewer Matt Maier injected some life, and a lot of improved beers, into Red Door in 2018. They started canning and doing some limited distribution.

Then, along came the COVID pandemic and lockdown. The Roswell taproom was the first casualty. By 2021, the decision was made to close the original location on Candelaria. Brewing was moved to the Mother Trail production facility at 12th Street and Bellamah.

Eventually, both Maier and operations manager Ali Cattin elected to move out of the brewing business. The partnership at Mother Trail came to an end, and the original Red Door brewhouse was sold to Nurvis Purvis Brewing in Carlsbad.

Some limited brewing was still taking place out at the Clovis locations, but otherwise it was just the good old bar downtown that represented what Red Door was in Albuquerque. Now, it fades into history. No specific reason was given, but we’re probably not reaching when we guess that the lease was up, profits were down due to rising inflation, and with the business now primarily focused on Clovis, it simply did not make financial sense to keep the bar open.

Whatever the reason, a final little piece of Albuquerque brewing history has met its end. The boom years of the mid-2010s seem like a distant memory now.

All of us in Albuquerque bid one last farewell. May Red Door continue to thrive in Clovis.

— Stoutmeister