Little Toad Creek Brewery & Distillery is a Silver City brewpub that also distills its own spirits, founded in 2012 and now operating taprooms in Silver City and Las Cruces. It is one of the few New Mexico businesses licensed to brew beer and distill liquor under the same name, and for most of southwestern New Mexico it is the closest thing to a hometown brewery.
The name is not whimsy. It comes from Sapillo Creek in the Gila, where the business started — sapillo being a diminutive for toad. Little Toad Creek began in 2012 as an inn and tavern out at Lake Roberts, surrounded by the Gila Wilderness, before moving into town.
From a Gila lake to Bullard Street
Teresa Dahl-Bredine and Dave Crosley founded the business together. Both grew up in Silver City and graduated from Silver High School in the same class, went their separate ways, and came back to the same small town to open a brewery. They married in 2012, the same year Little Toad Creek took shape.
The Silver City location at 200 N Bullard St opened in December 2013. The address matters more than most, because Bullard Street runs along the edge of the Big Ditch — the sunken park that was Silver City’s Main Street until the flood of July 1895 carved it roughly 55 feet below street level. The walking path through the Big Ditch ends right about where the brewpub sits. That piece of local history also shows up on the tap list as a beer name, which we will get to.
A second taproom followed in 2018 at 119 N Main St in downtown Las Cruces, putting Little Toad Creek beer about 150 miles east of where it is brewed and giving the brand a foothold in the state’s second-largest city.
What Little Toad Creek brews
The lineup is broad rather than specialized — lagers, pale ales, reds, browns, stouts and porters, with seasonals rotating through. Untappd lists more than forty beers under the brewery’s name. A few have accumulated enough check-ins to count as the flagships:
- Grumpy Old Troll IPA — Untappd lists it as a 6.9% American IPA at 84 IBU, the brewery’s most-sampled beer by a wide margin with more than 1,500 check-ins. The IBU number is the bitterness measurement, and 84 is firmly in the assertive range.
- Pendejo Porter — 8.2% and only 27 IBU, which tells you it leans into roast and sweetness rather than bitterness. It is the highest-rated of the well-sampled beers, scoring 3.7 across more than 1,300 Untappd ratings.
- Lucky Toad Lager — a 5% American amber lager at 17 IBU. The easy one on the list.
- Copper Ale — 6.5%, 29 IBU, an American amber ale.
- Big Ditch Brown — a 6% American brown ale, named for the park out the front door.
- Hop-a-long Rye IPA — 5.5% at 53 IBU, with rye in the grain bill for a drier, slightly peppery edge.
- Smarte Blonde — 4.8%, 20 IBU, a blonde ale.
- Stinky Dave Nitro Stout — 5%, poured on nitrogen rather than carbon dioxide, which is what gives a nitro stout that soft, creamy body instead of a sharp fizz.
Seasonals worth watching for include an Octoberfest Märzen at 5.7%, a Drunken Pumpkin that lands at 8.8%, and a Cherry Chocolate Imperial Stout that Untappd lists at 10.2%.
The distillery half
The other half of the operation is what makes Little Toad Creek unusual. The company distills its own gin, vodka, rum and bourbon, which means the cocktail menu at both taprooms is built mostly on house spirits — a bourbon drink made with bourbon distilled in the same building is not something most brewpubs can offer.
That side of the business turned into a statewide product line in September 2020, when Little Toad Creek launched Mixed-Up Mule canned cocktails: 12-ounce cans at 10% ABV, built on house gin, vodka or rum with not-from-concentrate juice instead of syrup. The first three were Watermelon Jalapeño, Gin & Grapefruit and Mojito. New Mexico Magazine reported that Teresa Dahl-Bredine got the idea from a watermelon-ginger-jalapeño drink she tried on a trip to Belize. The cans reached Whole Foods stores statewide and crossed into Texas in 2022.
The Deming plant
Canned cocktails outgrew the Silver City building, so the company bought a 76-acre property in Deming and is building out roughly 45,000 square feet of production space there — new stills, blending and canning lines, and pasteurization equipment, which matters because the cocktails are made without preservatives. Reporting on the project put the planned investment at about $4.8 million and the canning line’s capacity at up to 300 cans per minute.
New Markets Tax Credit financing for the facility closed in July 2025 through Finance New Mexico, with the project expected to add 15 to 20 new full-time jobs and retain 10 existing ones. Most of the new positions do not require a four-year degree. For Luna County, that is a meaningful number, and it is a reminder that a brewery can be a manufacturer too.
What regulars come back for
Read enough public comments about the Silver City taproom and the same things keep surfacing. The staff get singled out constantly for being warm and quick — it reads like a place where people know the servers’ names. The kitchen comes up nearly as often: this is a full brewpub menu, not a bar-snack afterthought, and the burgers, sandwiches and loaded nachos get the most attention. The house-spirit cocktails have their own following alongside the beer.
The other recurring theme is geographic. Silver City is the gateway town for the Gila National Forest, and a lot of people arrive at Little Toad Creek straight off a trail, dusty and hungry. A brewpub at the end of the Big Ditch path, in the last town with a real kitchen before the forest road to the Gila cliff dwellings, fills a role that has nothing to do with beer ratings.
Where can you find Little Toad Creek beer?
Two taprooms. The original is 200 N Bullard St in Silver City, open daily from 11 a.m. and running to midnight on Friday and Saturday. The second is 119 N Main St in downtown Las Cruces, which opens at 11:30 a.m. most days and stays open to 1 a.m. on weekends. The Mixed-Up canned cocktails are sold through retail across New Mexico. Hours shift with the season, so check the brewery’s own site before a long drive.
Is Little Toad Creek a brewery or a distillery?
Both, which is the whole point. It brews beer on site in Silver City and distills gin, vodka, rum and bourbon under the same roof, then uses those spirits in its taproom cocktails and its canned Mixed-Up line. Beer drinkers and cocktail drinkers can sit at the same table and both order something made in the building.
Worth the drive
Silver City sits about four hours from Albuquerque and a bit over two from Las Cruces, far enough that New Mexico’s southwest corner rarely makes it onto a brewery crawl. Little Toad Creek is a good argument for widening the circle: a brewpub founded by two people who grew up in the town, serving beer and spirits made a few feet from the taps, at the bottom end of a park that used to be Main Street.
Browse more New Mexico brewpubs on New Mexico Breweries, where the map covers every brewery, taproom and cidery in the state from Farmington to Las Cruces. If you are heading to Silver City, plan a designated driver or a rideshare for the trip home.
Beer details from Untappd.
