Los Alamos has a long tradition of alcohol consumption. Back in 1942 when the town was secret and scientists from all over the world were racing the Germans to build and atomic bomb in Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer held famous parties in his house a stone’s throw away from today’s Bathtub Row Brewing Co-op. People like Neils Bohr and Richard Feynman would smoke and drink until all hours, talking calculus, war and nuclear physics in beautiful old cabins and stone houses, buried in the deep snows of the cold war.
Those World War II parties were held in any one of the houses that line a street called “Bathtub Row” in Los Alamos, houses that were built for the staff of the Los Alamos Ranch School that taught high school aged boys on the Pajarito Plateau from 1917 until 1943. The US Government condemned the LARS property and took over the houses for the top scientists at the Manhattan Project. As housing was quickly built for everyone else, there was no steel to spare for luxuries like bathtubs, but the old headmaster houses already had bathtubs. Thus the name; “Bathtub Row.” The top dogs of the Manhattan Project were the only people in town with bathtubs.
Imagine being a beer-head today in Los Alamos (of all places), isolated on the Pajarito Plateau with the vast Rio Grande Valley yawning below you. Imagine thirst on a sunny summer Sunday or a reasonable need for quality suds after a day of skiing or hiking into the Valles Caldera National Preserve. Imagine being a PhD and wanting to do beer right, down to the organization that makes it.
Los Alamos is one of the highest income towns in the United States and it makes no sense for people there to be without their own locally brewed beer especially with the threat of a local volcanic eruption looming sometime in the next 2 million years from the giant volcano just west of town.
Today the Bathtub Row houses are on the National Register of Historic Places which is administered by the National Park Service that has a new office for the Manhattan Project National Historic Park in downtown Los Alamos. Two of the houses are owned by the Los Alamos Historical Society so you can visit and take yourself back to another evening… so long ago.
Los Alamos people can drive to Santa Fe to enjoy a plethora of tab beers that spurt out like grain fields blown sideways, or drive to Espanola where the Blue Heron Brewery serves some fine suds. But after a hard day at “the Lab,” doing whatever, or at other jobs nearby, you need local beer.
In April 2015, a group of people met over beers in the library, and conceived the Bathtub Row Brewing Co-op. This leads one to believe that the participants may have been baby boomers who didn’t want a purely capitalistic venture, but one that could be shared by all those pining for good beer in that spring of their discontent.
On Bathtub Row’s Beer Co-op’s webpage you can learn what a co-op is: “A Co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.
Co-operatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. In the tradition of their founders, Co-operative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others.”
Back in the 1970s there were food co-ops in places like Albuquerque and Santa Cruz, California where you could work at the co-op to lower the price of your bulk wheat or tofu. Locally the old hippy food co-op of Albuquerque became La Montanita Food Co-op in 4 locations around the state. REI, the big outdoor retailer in Santa Fe and elsewhere is also a co-op of sorts, owned by its members. REI is more of a collective than a co-op but the roots of REI, as a alpine gear buyer’s club in Seattle in 1938, have similar roots to these other co-ops.
There are other beer co-ops in the US, just not very many. Three others exist and three are in the works. One wonders when Santa Fe may have a beer co-op….
Bathtub Row Brewing Co-op is in a building that has housed drinking since the 1960s. In the 60s and 70s when there was music in the air and marijuana was very popular in Los Alamos, a business called “ABC Liquors” was housed in the very building that today is the beer co-op. Later the building housed a bar where you could play pool and avoid your responsibilities. After that bar (name forgotten) closed, the building was totally updated and upgraded and made ready with an outdoor patio where you can see the mountains and various historic buildings full of radioactive ghosts.
We dropped by on our way from the Valles Caldera and quaffed a few brews in the late afternoon and filled our insulated growler. You can get half growlers at the Bathtub Row. They call these smaller bottles “Squeelers”.
We had the Hoppenheimer IPA, which is just great., full of multi dimensional hops. We also tried the Belgian Bommer, which came in the correct glass for a Belgian beer, and we tried their Sour: Lichtenhainer, which was really good and low in alcohol.
Bathtub row has a professional brewmaster who knows his craft. You don’t have to be a member to enjoy beer there and the prices are very reasonable.
Come on up. Los Alamos has wonderful trails all over the County, some on US Forest Service land, and some on National Park Service land. I recommend going to Camp May on Pajarito Mountain and hiking to the rim of the caldera. Bring your Squeeler.
Located at Nectar and 19th Street in downtown Los Alamos.
