Bad Ass Brewery

No Longer In Business

Yet another brewery I’ve been fortunate enough to experience on opening day. Sadly, over the course of more than a year, they went through several employees (both as brewers and servers/tenders) and the owner had responsibilities that kept him from ensuring the quality of his brews. Initially solid, his small-batch experience (42 gallon Blickmann fermenters x6) and methods manifested as a claimed ’22 beers on tap’. Unfortunately, several of those were simply a base ale mixed with fruit extracts (apricot, blueberry, cherry, etc) and the initial quality vanished as incompetent brewers neglected simple process standards...such as cleaning equipment. As several reviewers have noted, the beers tended on the sweet side, because the recipes were scaled up fro smaller batch sizes, WITHOUT ADJUSTING THE AMOUNT OF YEAST USED IN EACH BATCH. As an experienced homebrewer and regular customer(3+ days a week) I watched them dump hundreds of gallons of bad brews down the drain. Finally, the bartender(s) were criminally inept, simply because the owner employed his mentally unstable brother (true story) who not only knew nothing about beer, but also regularly threatened or insulted customers. His replacement(s) treated the establishment as their own personal hangout, often ignoring other customers in favor of non-paying friends, playing heavy metal and alternative music at loud volumes, and generally making other/new customers uncomfortable IN ADDITION to serving mediocre or completely unfinished beers. Recent visits have not been possible - they have not been open during regular business hours for several weeks atm. The few decent beers they made were lost to the horrible atmosphere and poor service overall.

This is a classically tragic place. Exterior is a strip mall, interior is a dive bar with a few growlers and bottles on the wall. Seemingly no attention to the appearance or comfort of the place. Though they advertise 22 beers on tap, when we arrived there were fewer than twenty, and mysteriously three more were erased while we were there despite none of the eight patrons in the joint ordering said beers. The bartender was nice enough, if a little awkward, but knew NOTHING about the beers, which is sort of a requisite when half the beer names don’t mention their style.

But that seemingly nightmarish beginning is all beside the tragic part of the story. The tragedy lies in the brewer behind the operation. This establishment is his dream, and despite the paucity of patrons five months after opening, he still seemed thrilled to be there as he passed by the bar to return to brewing his beer. That beer is the real problem. On his website he states that after 26,000 batches of beer, he’s only brewed three bad batches. Either he’s utterly disillusioned, or I got really, REALLY unlucky to sample all three of those batches on my only trip. The beers are unbelievably under attenuated. We’re not talking a little sweet like people complain that Hopslam is too sweet, or that many Three Floyd’s beers are sweet. We’re talking cotton candy in every pint. Another fellow checking out the place commented under his breath, "I think somebody forgot to add the hops to the IPA." Actually the hopping rate was probably adequate, but it was incredibly hard to tell behind the wall of sugar.

At the end of the day, perhaps aside from the misguided passion of the brewer, pretty much every rateable aspect of this place is a downer, and coupling that with the lack of following so far, I’m not sure anybody will have to worry about that for much longer.

A new brewpub (5 months old) in Albuquerque. It is a small place in a strip mall with a small bar and a few tables. 2 small TVs at the bar. They make 20 beers, although they are not all necessarily on at one time (15 were on when I was there, plus ~5 guest beers). Although they certainly offer a wide variety of styles, they all seemed to have one thing in common: sweetness. Additionally, the bartender was not very knowledgeable about the beers at all (ie one patron asked what style the Bad Ass beer was and he could not come up with an answer but did point to a glass and said "it’s this color"). Also it seemed weird to me that before you ordered a beer, the bartender asked if you wanted a sample first just to make sure. So unfortunately, the beers were not great and it’s not a place I’d return unless they improved the beer. No real food here, but you can buy peanuts/pistachios/popcorn for $1. Pints during happy hour (3-6pm) are $3. Check it out if you’re nearby, but keep expectations low.