Where Santa Fe’s Eight Craft Breweries Get their Water

 

When you sit down to a locally made beer, 93% of the beer in your glass is water. That’s true of any beer anywhere, but here in the desert Southwest, water is the most valuable substance we have and critical for our favorite beverage – beer!

Most people pay attention to where their craft beer comes from and the water the brewery uses makes a huge difference to the quality of the beer. Most breweries are highly conscious of the water they use because bad tasting water will make bad tasting beer.

The southern Rocky Mountains (from Salida, Colorado to Santa Fe) provide water for roughly 30 breweries in 8 communities. Durango gets its water from the Animas River watershed, Salida from the Arkansas River watershed, while Santa Fe, Taos, Alamosa, Los Alamos, and Crestone all rely on the Rio Grande for this essential element for life and for beer. Sitting on the brew pub stool, you are sitting in a watershed and drinking of that watershed.

So who cares? Why should a beer drinker give half a tortilla chip where his/her beer’s water comes from? Grounding yourself in place through beer is essential to drinking in your local environment…literally.

Those mountains looming over Santa Fe, Taos, or Durango collect winter snows (or the lack of them) and those snows feed streams, rivers, springs and lakes. More important for the high desert towns around here, the melting snows soak into the ground in huge quantities and those underground waters appear as springs or they get pumped up by wells to feed houses or towns.

The high country collects far more snow than falls on the valley floors. In a good year like 2016, the Santa Fe Ski Basin got 140 inches of snow while Santa Fe got 25 inches. High country snow is critical for everyone’s water supply in the west.

Beer Water Santa Fe

Over time, we’ll talk about the water supply for all our regional brewery towns. Let’s start with Santa Fe as an example of beer water in action. Brewers in Santa Fe have water supplied by the city which comes from three different sources. Smaller towns may only have one source but Santa Fe long ago outgrew its original water source – the Santa Fe “River” which supplied water for the earliest Pueblo inhabitants of the town when they established Santa Fe (by some other name) around the year 1050, and for the small Spanish town established here in 1607 and on until today.

The Santa Fe River comes from the high mountains around the Santa Fe Ski Basin where snowfall melts an runs down various watersheds toward the valley below. Unfortunately these little watersheds are not very productive because of big weather patterns. We don’t have strong creeks running through town the way Crested Butte or Ouray, Colorado do.

Since New Mexico is just below the normal northerly flow of storms off the Pacific Ocean in the winter time, we get what we can from fluctuations of the storm track driven by the Jet Stream, a huge river of air that snakes around over North America in a drunkenly erratic fashion. Some years we have plenty of snow and others, when cold ocean temperatures off the Pacific Ocean (la Nina) keep atmospheric moisture low and the Jet Stream far to the north, we suffer badly and the mountains stay dry all winter (see 2018).

Even though the mountains above Santa Fe are almost 13,000 feet (3900 meters) high, they still collect relatively small amounts of water for the Santa Fe River where snowpack melts into the creek which fills two dams which feed water to a purification plant. The city and the US Forest Service (who manages the land for all of us) has been struggling to restore the forests in the watershed to their pre-European settlement condition which will make them less prone to a high intensity wildfire, and will create conditions where the maximum amount of water can enter the stream and not just evaporate.

The Santa Fe River was first dammed for the town’s water supply in 1881 and today, with fluctuating drought, the River provides about 22% of the town’s water supply in years with high water flow. The rest of Santa Fe’s water supply comes from wells drilled more than a thousand feet deep near the Rio Grande River. Santa Fe also takes water directly out of the Rio Grande.

That well water flows off the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo Mountains, flows down through rock formations far underground and collects in large pools that have been in place for tens of thousands of years. Unfortunately, despite being treated by the City, the well and Rio Grande diversion water is pretty hard, meaning it is high in minerals.

This year, with little snow (so far), we can expect Santa Fe to rely on the Buckman Wells heavily since the Rio Grande will run low and the Santa Fe Watershed will provide very little water.

The Rio Grande gets almost all of its water from the San Juan Mountains in Colorado, a huge pile of very high peaks in the southwest corner of the state. The Chama River, the largest of the Rio Grande tributaries, gathers water from the South San Juan Mountains above (you guessed it) Chama, New Mexico. The main stem of the Rio Grande flows out of the San Juan Mountains near Crede, Colorado before flowing through Alamosa and down the Rio Grande Gorge. Very little surface water comes from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains either in Colorado or in New Mexico.

As RMBE continues our quest to taste and report on all the craft breweries in our region, we will talk about how each brewery works with the water from its local watershed to make a fine tasting brew for us. Stay tuned for those posts!

by Tom Ribe