The second round of the New Mexico Brewers Guild IPA Challenge is set for Saturday afternoon at Icebox Brewing in Las Cruces. The Crew will not be braving the heat and driving down I-25, but we will do our best to get the results out when the Guild announces the voting totals.

Last weekend, Downshift Brewing narrowly edged out the field with 16 votes to take the early lead at Second Street Rufina. Two-time winner Gravity Bound (15 votes), Sidetrack (13), Ex Novo (11), and Flix (11) rounded out the top five.

Recent years have shown a preference toward the local breweries down south, which bodes well for Downshift and host Icebox, which garnered just three votes in Santa Fe. There’s usually a surprise among the Albuquerque metro and northern breweries, too.

For anyone brave enough to drive south amid the heat, or for those reading this who already live down there, the ticket link is active. This is the Guild’s largest fundraiser of the year, and it’s all for fun bragging rights, so go have a little fun.

The round is scheduled to run from noon to 2:30 p.m., or whenever all the votes are in and counted. For clarification, since Icebox has so many taprooms, this is at the main brewery at 2825 West Picacho Ave. The final round will be at Boxing Bear Firestone on August 1.

Anyway, speaking of Las Cruces (and southern NM breweries in general) …

More taprooms coming to the south

In can anyone without social media missed it, Santa Fe Brewing sure dropped a big hint that they are headed to Las Cruces in the near future. We can confirm that there will be a SFBC taproom down south, as was rumored back before the pandemic hit. However, they will be taking over an existing space, not building something new from the ground up.

So, Brew Crew, care to share anything else? Well, we will, but only after we interview SFBC owner Brian Lock next week. We want to make sure we have all the details before we print anything else.

Meanwhile, across the south in Hobbs, the JF Maddox Foundation is building a new development that will include the town’s first food hall. One of the two confirmed tenants is Drylands Brewing, per a release on Instagram.

Drylands, which is based in nearby Lovington, had a taproom on the north end of Hobbs a few years ago. That location closed and the taproom license was transferred over to a space inside a local casino. It did not last long over there, either.

This seems like a much better opportunity for Drylands, particularly if they can anchor the food hall the way that SFBC anchors Green Jeans and Tin Can Alley here in Albuquerque.

You can add those moves to Open Space’s downtown Silver City taproom and Guadalupe Mountain’s upcoming move into the former Bandolero Brewery space in Clovis. As soon as these darned temps start dropping, the Crew clearly needs to head south to get more details on all of these projects.

We promise, though, if anything does percolate up here in the Albuquerque metro area and Santa Fe, we will jump on it as quickly as possible.

Keep supporting local!

— Stoutmeister