The Crew’s holiday beer merch guide — Santa Fe edition

Editor’s note: By popular request, the Crew is compiling all the info you will need on all the non-beer gifts you can purchase for others (or yourself) from our local breweries this holiday season. Luke, our Santa Fe-based writer, handled the breweries up there. We had hoped to get more of these stories ready before…

Reflections on the first Santa Fe Open Brewing Competition

This past weekend, the inaugural Santa Fe Open Brewing Competition took place in, you’ve guessed it, Santa Fe. From Friday morning to the awards ceremony on Sunday afternoon, the Sangre De Cristo Craft Brewers homebrew club (and friends and family) came together in a huge concerted effort to put on an event that proved an…

Santa Fe Brewing takes a left turn at Albuquerque

Soon, Albuquerque, soon you will be getting the full Santa Fe Brewing Company experience. Soon, you’ll get to know them like I do, like family, like that crazy partying family that eats, sleeps, and breathes (and of course drinks) cerveza. No doubt you’ve already heard that Santa Fe Brewing Co. will be building a taproom…

Santa Fe Brewing returns to the dark side

A cold wind blows in from the north, chilling all who dare to venture outside. The leaves have all but fallen from the trees, leaving only skeleton sentinels to guard the streets of Santa Fe. The ghostly wisps of snow have already begun to gather in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, watching as the last…

Recapping the Oktoberfiesta fun in pictures

This past Saturday, as promised (or as warned), I attended Santa Fe Brewing Co.’s grand swingin’ shindig, Oktoberfiesta, and it was a perfect end to a great festival season. Now let me begin by saying that Stoutmeister had told me that I didn’t have to work because it was my birthday, and so it was…

Beer Notes: The quiet time is upon us

Put away those sample glasses. Don’t worry about what’s being served. Festival season for 2014 is over (well, save for one event, see below) and as such, the beer news is grinding (almost) to a halt. It’s the quiet period, which usually lasts from now through the holidays, and it can be maddening for a…

Something wicked (fun) this way comes: Oktoberfiesta is back

As I was driving home from Red River’s Oktoberfest last Sunday, I had a couple questions on my mind. How much Oktoberfest is too much Oktoberfest? And can anyone really have too much Oktoberfest in their lives? The answers that I came up with were thus: “too much” is too broad of a statement, and…

Oktoberfest in Red River: It’s like a party in the Alps

Every year, around the middle of October, we take the short trip up to Red River for their Oktoberfest celebration. Set in the small Northern New Mexico mountain resort town, Oktoberfest is an ideal excuse to get away from the hustle and bustle of city life and spend some time drinking beer amid nature, as…

Best of the (Brew) Fest plus other notes from one wild afternoon

No one got sunburned! Well, that’s how we all looked back on NM Brew Fest 5 after a long, rough Sunday (our football teams, real and fantasy, didn’t help our hangovers, either). OK, we also looked back at the many great beers we drank and how much fun we had. From the VIP barrel-aged beginning…

More fun than a barrel of monkeys, er, beer, it’s NM Brew Fest 5

Beer festival season wraps up (sniff) in our state with the fifth annual NM Brew Fest at Expo New Mexico (the fairgrounds) this Saturday. It promises to go out with a bang, thanks to a special early event admission where you get to taste multiple barrel-aged beers brought in by the NM Brewers Guild. Yes,…