New Mexico's beer story doesn't begin with the modern craft boom — it begins on a horse ranch south of Santa Fe in 1988, and in a handful of high-desert taprooms that opened long before anyone was calling it a movement.
**The 1980s and '90s Pioneers**
Santa Fe Brewing Company, founded in 1988, is New Mexico's oldest craft brewery and one of the oldest in the entire Southwest. It was followed by Canteen Brewhouse, which traces its roots to 1994 and has since collected a wall of national medals, and by Eskes in Taos and Second Street in Santa Fe, both pouring by the mid-1990s. Down in Farmington, Three Rivers opened in 1997, bringing craft beer to the remote Four Corners.
**The Boom Years**
The 2010s changed everything. La Cumbre and Bosque both launched in the early part of the decade and grew into statewide names, La Cumbre with its GABF-gold Elevated IPA and Bosque with its medal-winning Scale Tipper. Santa Fe's Rowley Farmhouse Ales won national brewpub-of-the-year honors for its sours just a year after opening. The number of breweries in the state multiplied, and a distinctly Southwestern beer culture — green chile beers, high-altitude taprooms, desert-hardy hop bills — came into its own.
**A State Like No Other**
What makes New Mexico's scene special is its landscape. In a single road trip you can drink at a mile-high city brewery, an 8,700-foot ski-village brewpub on the Enchanted Circle, a Gila Wilderness gateway in Silver City, and a high-plains taproom out east. Few states pour their beer against such dramatic backdrops.
The Land of Enchantment has earned its pint.