La Cumbre Brewing Co. is an Albuquerque production brewery that opened in December 2010 and has operated out of a warehouse on Girard Blvd NE ever since. The name is Spanish for the summit, and the brewery earned the comparison faster than almost anyone expected: less than a year after opening, it came home from the Great American Beer Festival with three medals.
One of them was gold, in the single most crowded category on the floor.
From Chama River to a Girard Boulevard warehouse
Jeff and Laura Erway founded La Cumbre in 2010. Jeff’s path into professional brewing started the way a lot of them do, with homebrewing that got out of hand, and then went formal: he completed the American Brewers Guild brewing program and joined the brewing staff at Albuquerque’s Chama River Brewing Company before striking out on his own.
That order matters. By the time La Cumbre opened its doors, the person designing the recipes had already spent years brewing commercially in the same city, for the same palates. The brewery did not spend its first two years finding its voice. It arrived with one.
What does La Cumbre Brewing Co. brew?
La Cumbre is, first and most obviously, an IPA brewery. More than half of the beers listed on its New Mexico Breweries listing are IPAs of some description, spread across American, hazy, imperial and rye versions. But the lineup runs considerably wider than that reputation suggests: a hefeweizen, a Mexican-style lager, a festbier, an amber ale, an apricot saison, a fruited gose, an American porter, and two stouts, one of them a Russian imperial at 10.5% ABV.
The short version: hops are the headline, and the rest of the board is deeper than the headline implies.
Elevated IPA and the 2011 gold medal
Elevated IPA was one of the first beers La Cumbre ever brewed, and it is still the one the brewery is known for. Untappd lists it as a 7.2% American IPA at 100 IBU — IBU is a rough measure of bitterness, and 100 sits at the firm end of the style. Untappd users rate it 4.00. The brewery’s own description leans on aroma rather than bitterness, promising what it calls “an obscene amount of hop aroma” over a dry, balanced base.
At the 2011 Great American Beer Festival, Elevated took gold in American-Style India Pale Ale. That category drew 176 entries that year, making it the largest in the competition. The beer followed it with a bronze at the 2012 World Beer Cup.
Well over a decade later, Elevated accounts for about 60 percent of everything the brewery makes. That is an unusual share for a single beer, and it says something about how completely one recipe can define a brewery’s economics.
Project Dank, the hop experiment that never ends
Having a flagship that sells 60 percent of your beer is a good problem with a predictable side effect: the brewers make the same thing every day. Project Dank started as the answer to that. It is not a recipe but a series — an ever-changing IPA where each release focuses on different hop varieties and different hopping techniques, built for drinkers who want intensity rather than broad appeal.
The hopping rate is the part that gets attention. Erway has described using eight pounds of hops per barrel in a Project Dank batch, roughly double what many double IPAs get.
It began draft-only and has since graduated to a quarterly canned release in 16-ounce four-packs. The series has also collected hardware of its own: a two-time National IPA Challenge champion and a Great American Beer Festival bronze medalist. Untappd lists the current version at 7.5% ABV and 100 IBU, rated 4.09.
If you want to see what the brewery does when nobody is asking it to be consistent, this is the tap to look for.
Beyond the IPAs
A few of the non-IPA beers are worth knowing by name if you are building a flight:
- Malpais Stout — a 7.5% foreign/export stout at 60 IBU. The style is a stronger, more roast-forward cousin of the Irish dry stout, built historically to survive a long shipping route.
- La Negra — a Russian imperial stout at 10.5% ABV and 80 IBU, rated 4.09 on Untappd. Dark, sweet, heavy on roast and dried fruit, and a sipping beer by design.
- Gilded Age Porter — 5.7% ABV, 35 IBU. An American porter sits a step lighter than a stout, with chocolate and coffee notes but a thinner body.
- Azulito — a 4.8% Mexican-style lager at 18 IBU. Crisp, light and the most sessionable thing on the board.
- Father Nelson — a 10.6% imperial IPA at 100 IBU, rated 4.15 on Untappd. The big-brother version of Full Nelson, and the strongest hop statement in the lineup.
Seasonally, the brewery runs an Oktoberfest festbier at 5.4% and a winter edition of Project Dank, so the board shifts through the year rather than sitting still.
Two taprooms in Albuquerque
The original taproom is attached to the brewery at 3313 Girard Blvd NE, open daily from noon, with later hours Friday and Saturday. It is a two-level space with seating upstairs and down, a patio with string lights, board games on the shelf, and a rotating schedule of food trucks instead of a kitchen. Dogs are welcome outside. Regulars consistently mention two things: table service, which is not a given in a brewery taproom, and staff who remember them.
The second location, the West Side Taproom, is at 5600 Coors Blvd NW and serves the same beers to the other side of the river. It also runs food trucks, beer releases and live music.
Both taprooms post their tap lists with style and strength spelled out, which is the small courtesy that makes a long tap board approachable instead of intimidating. If you are driving, plan for a designated driver or a rideshare — the stronger beers here are genuinely strong.
Where to start
Order Elevated first, even if you think you know what an American IPA tastes like. It is the beer that made national judges take New Mexico IPA seriously, and it is still the brewery’s calling card. Then ask what Project Dank is pouring, because the answer changes every time.
La Cumbre is one of more than a hundred places listed on New Mexico Breweries, our statewide directory and map of New Mexico breweries, brewpubs, taprooms and cideries. Find La Cumbre on the map, see what else is within a few blocks, and build the afternoon from there.
Beer details from Untappd.
