The beer festivals are coming: A guide to surviving the onslaught

Beer festival season in New Mexico and neighboring states is about to kick into overdrive. To help everyone out, we put together a list of the key info you need to know (what/when/where/how much, etc.) in order to plan out how to keep your liver functioning and you bank account from evaporating. What: ABQ Hopfest…

Beer Notes: A thousand posts and counting

A little while back, well, five stories ago, we hit our 1,000th post here on this site. There was no celebration or anything, but it was a bit of a milestone. We have written a lot about beer the last four-plus years, and we plan to keep this thing going as long as we are…

Bombs away! Prairie rolls into New Mexico

Some astute eyes on social media may have spotted a teaser from Favorite Brands NM last week that Prairie Artisan Ales is coming here. Well, despite the lack of a formal press release, we can confirm that the popular Oklahoma-based brewery will be debuting today (Tuesday) with five of their beers on tap at Nob…

A little beer history for the weekend

As I prepare to ramble tomorrow (Saturday) about beer to an audience at the library where I work, progress is being made on the Albuquerque beer history book I am writing for The History Press, a division of Arcadia Publishing. One thing I obtained this week from fellow author Jon Stott was a chronology of…

The first brewery in Raton is close to completion

Every now and again, amid the spam and the weirder information requests, the Crew gets an email of some value. Sometimes it can be a small tip, other times it can be a full-on news item. We received one of the latter at the end of last week, a welcome update to a brewery project…

The Week Ahead in Beer: Happy birthday to the Bear!

Greetings, New Mexico craft beer lovers. Stoutmeister here with The Week Ahead in Beer. This column covers all the breweries in Bernalillo and Sandoval counties, with Santa Fe’s four breweries and one down in Socorro and the other in Los Alamos also joining the party. Remember recently when I noted how it seems like all…

IPA Challenge 2016: The last-minute info for the final round

Bitter is ending! The 2016 NM IPA Challenge comes to a close on Saturday at Tractor Wells Park. The final round will start at noon and run until 4 p.m. These are the things you probably already know, but just in case there was any additional important info, we contacted the hosts to make sure…