An ode to Twisted Chile and the small-town brewery

Saturday will mark the final day of operation for Twisted Chile Brewing in Socorro. It will mark the end of a two-and-a-half-year journey for owners K.C. and Stephanie McFadden, who did their best to bring quality craft beer back to the small town 70 miles south of Albuquerque.

Twisted Chile is just the latest of many breweries to pop up in small towns in New Mexico, burn bright, and then fade away. The reasons they fail are as varied as the reasons others continue to live on. If there was a clear answer to what it takes to work it all out, certainly there would not be so many casualties.

For each of them, the ongoing survivors and the dearly departed, there was or still is a certain charm, a bit of an underdog mentality, that permeates all of these breweries. Even as more and more packaged beers arrive from the big boys in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, they keep rolling along, or they fade away.

The firs

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