Attention hopheads, your favorite time of the year is almost upon us. The 2024 New Mexico IPA Challenge kicks off this weekend with the elimination round, which the public does not attend, but the Crew will be there as proverbial flies on the wall to detail how it all turns out. We caught up with…
Tag: Canteen Brewhouse
Canteen gets totally radical for their most excellent 30th anniversary shindig
Cue the 90s pop culture references. How many? All of them. Canteen Brewhouse is turning 30 years old and throwing it back to the decade that they started as Il Vicino Brewing with some epic events this Thursday through Sunday, with the big party set for Saturday. It was way back in 1994 that Rick…
The Week Ahead in Beer: Celebrating women, baseball and a Run with Joy
Some weeks it can be hard to pick a single thing to focus on here in the intro. This week, the dilemma was more what don’t we focus on, and leave out, and subsequently feel really bad about doing that. Ah, to heck with it, let us sum up a very event-heavy week with some…
The Week Ahead in Beer: Add books to the list of things that go well with beers
We don’t pay attention to every little thing beer-related on social media, but over the past year, we noticed the rise in accounts dedicated to both reading great books and enjoying beers. Whether locally based or nationally based, it’s been fun to see some folks bust out a novel to go with their flight of…
Canteen overcomes a challenging year and rolls toward its 30th anniversary
It was not just one of those years over at Canteen Brewhouse. It was, perhaps, the most fraught and difficult year of the 29-year existence of what was once Il Vicino Brewing. Back in the summer, the glycol chiller went down, and it left the brewery with a seven-week stretch of not actually brewing. With…
The Week Ahead in Beer: Slow sippin’ for a cause all November long
Anyone else exhausted? Halloween was a lot this year, stretched over a weekend-plus (or pretty much the entire month, right, Launchpad staff?) for regular folks and all the brewery employees out there. It’s times like this where it will be nice to just kick back with a relaxing pint and do good just by sipping…
Balloons and Brews at Steel Bender leads list of Fiesta-related brewery events
We have all been here before. The day before the Balloon Fiesta kicks off, the day before the chaos, the day before all the poor doggos bark their little heads off, the traffic backs up, and the tourists arrive in droves. Thank goodness there is local craft beer. Our breweries are our refuge from all…
Canteen and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad glycol chiller
The hottest summer in recorded history was far from kind to breweries throughout the state. Many faced issues keeping their equipment humming, particularly any and all cooling devices. From Milton’s in Carlsbad to the CNM brewing school in Albuquerque, chillers big and small were strained to the limit. No one, though, had a worse run…
Ullr Fest this weekend marks the end of summer (finally!)
It felt like it was regularly 150 degrees right up until this week, so you may have been caught off guard by the first beer festival of the fall season. Now it’s cool and rainy, and heck, there may even be prospects for snow someday. Ullr Fest at the Pajarito Mountain lodge above Los Alamos…
Longtime Canteen staffer Mike Thrall dies after yearlong battle with cancer
The sad news began to trickle out late last week: Canteen beertender Mike Thrall, a fixture in the craft beer community for many years, had lost his battle with throat cancer. The Crew received confirmation that Mike died last Thursday morning, which Canteen shared in a Facebook post today (Monday). “It is with great sadness…
DARK SIDE BREW CREW 