Galen Clarke/Tribune

Brewer Bill Krostag of Turtle Mountain Brewing Co. in Rio Rancho fills kegs after a full day of brewing. Krostag has been a home brewer for 16 years and has worked at Turtle Mountain for three years. "We don't make a lot of money, but we drink a lot of beer so we don't really care," Krostag said. "I put on 20 pounds since I started here."

Galen Clarke/Tribune

Brewer Bill Krostag fills up a growler of beer from one of the taps at Turtle Mountain Brewing Co. in Rio Rancho. Kegs of beer brewed by Turtle Mountain are delivered to the company's brewery locations and restaurants, as well as to the Santa Ana Star Center during the New Mexico Scorpions hockey team's season.

Galen Clarke/Tribune

Beer brewerd at Turtle Mountain Brewing Co. in Rio Rancho is stored in large tanks in a refrigerated room in the back of the brewery at 905 36th Place, off of Southern Boulevard. It takes eight minutes to fill a keg of beer from the tanks.

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In the centuries-old tradition of the German beer purity law, Reinheitsgebot, beer can include only water, barley, hops and yeast.

It's a law that's affected the trade, consumption and brewing of beer around the world for decades.

But for New Mexico craft brewer Mark Matheson, there's tradition and then there's innovation.

"U.S. craft brewers are just really good at being creative," said Matheson, master brewer at Turtle Mountain Brewing Co. in Rio Rancho. "What's great about the New Mexico brewing industry is the technical skill and artistry of the brewers here."

There are 17 master brewers in the state of New Mexico. Nine brew beer in the Albuquerque metro area, and all of them have beers that comply with Reinheitsgebot. All of them also have concoctions that include ingredients like honey, dark cherries or orange rind, and consumer demand for creative craft beers has never been higher.

According to the Brewers Association in Colorado, craft beer industry sales in the United States have grown 31.5 percent over the past three years. In New Mexico, brewers produced 19,523 barrels, up 4,969 barrels from 2005.

Craft beer brewers are part chef, chemist, engineer and marketer, said Ted Rice, master brewer at Chama River Brewing Co. in Albuquerque.

"Being a small pub brewer or even a small micro, a lot of times you do everything from order the ingredients, design the beers, ensure costs are in line, educate staff and customers on the product, and market the beer," Rice said. "It's running a business, it's science, it's marketing."

Home brewer to head brewer

Becoming a professional beer brewer takes years of practice in order to master the delicate chemistry of tasty brews. Matheson was fortunate enough to begin that practice when he was a teenager.

"My parents were totally cool with it, so I practiced on a homebrew kit," he said.

Growing up in Stockton, Calif., Matheson started home brewing in high school because of "a fascination with beer and the brewing process." After taking a wine vintner course at a junior college, his fixation with fermentation was confirmed.

In 1984 he enrolled at the University of California, Davis, for a brewing program and eventually started working at breweries and wineries, including a stint at St. Clair Winery in Deming.

"I even found myself waking up at three in the morning to go brew beer at Rubicon brewpub in Sacramento," he said. "I learned the nuts and bolts of my brewing philosophy there."

Aside from the variations on main ingredients, beer brewers can add flavor enhancers to give their beers even more distinction.

So, what flavors can be used?

"Well, you could start by looking in your spice cabinet," said Rice, who brews a beer called Saison Rouge with star anise and orange rind as flavor enhancers.

Mike Campbell of Tractor Brewing Co. in Los Lunas brews a Hay Maker Honey Wheat Ale that requires 365 pounds of locally harvested honey, mixed into 1,000 gallons of beer.

"At two bucks a pound for that honey, that's my most expensive beer to brew," Campbell said.

Water and chemistry

Craft beer brewers note that there is a clear difference between their beers and the large, industrial domestic beers from brewers like Coors Brewing Co. and Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc.

Micro breweries are built on the purity law, using barley in their beers, said Rich Weber, brewing and packaging manager at Sierra Blanca Brewing Co. in Moriarty, New Mexico's largest brewery producing more than 4,000 barrels per year.

The industrial brewers, by comparison, use broken rice husks for three cents a pound compared to 60 cents a pound for barley, Weber said.

"With crafts you're getting a darn good product because of quality ingredients," he said.

Still, brewers must know how to best use the ingredients. Barley, hops and yeast come in dozens of flavors and styles from markets as far as Europe.

Brewers also need to make sure they even have the ingredients in the first place.

"We try to tell our companies to set aside ingredients based on our projected sales," said Brady McKeown, master brewer at Il Vicino Brewing Co. in Albuquerque. "But some of these companies protect how much they're going to sell, and there are more and more micros popping up."

Whatever combination craft brewers use of water, barley, hops, yeast and a possible flavor enhancer, brewing a consistent product remains a challenge.

The water alone presents a bevy of unique opportunities for brewers. Some use a reverse osmosis and distillation process to remove all the minerals in water, leaving a raw element to tinker with.

"The big boys or those who want real consistency take everything out of the water and then add minerals to mimic the water of Munich or London," Campbell said. "But then again, there's nothing wrong with turning the spigot and using what you got."

Brewing a business

When the water is ready to be used, brewers mash it up with the barley and produce what is known as wort. The wort is then boiled in a kettle, hops and flavors are added, and it's passed through a heat exchanger on its way to a fermentation vat where yeast is introduced.

Depending on the size and capacity of a brewery, new equipment for a brewpub or microbrewer can run into the millions of dollars.

That is, of course, if brewers didn't buy used equipment during the late '90s industry shakedown when hundreds of small breweries sprang up only to shut down soon after.

"A brewpub is a restaurant with a brewery attached and not a brewery with a restaurant attached," Matheson said. "It's important to focus on service, food quality and regulating costs, something that forced a lot of people out of business."

Aside from equipment costs, brewers must also decide which business model to follow.

"To me there's a huge distinction," said Matheson, of Turtle Mountain. "Brewpubs primarily sell beer on the premises and micros sell beer in bottles."

If a brewing company experiences success as a brewpub, the next logical step is to open more brewpubs or a bottling facility, said Rice, of Chama River, who, with help from Santa Fe Dining, will open Marble Brewing Co. Downtown in the fall to expand on brewing operations and begin packaging.

The package deal

Both Tractor Brewing Co. and Sierra Blanca Brewing Co. are examples of packaging facilities in New Mexico, and each require more equipment and supplies for packaging, further increasing operating costs.

For example, the company that supplies Campbell with six-pack carriers requires a minimum order of 50,000 units at 45 cents each and 55 cents for the case box to carry all the six-packs. Campbell also has to make space to store everything, so his packaging supplies - including some 90,000 bottles - are all stored in an extra shed separate from the brewery.

"There's almost as much money tied up in packaging a case of beer as the beer itself," he said.

With extra overhead in mind, last year six New Mexico brewers consolidated their operations at Sierra Blanca in Moriarty in an effort to cut costs all around.

Mark DeVesty, co-founder of Isotopes Brewing Co. in Albuquerque, is one of the beneficiaries of the move. By taking his recipes to Weber who will brew and bottle them, DeVesty frees space in his brewery to produce enough beer for the Isotopes baseball games.

"Several of us have all been friends for 15 years or more, so we're really not in it for competition," said Campbell about the nature of the craft beer brewing industry.

Staying alive

It's about 10:30 a.m. at Turtle Mountain Brewing Co. and a double batch of beer is brewing.

Surrounded by 15-foot tall steel fermentation vats connected by a matrix of pipes and hoses, Matheson is crouching down in knee-high white rubber boots, collecting a bucket of yeast for a new batch of beer.

"We're all on the small side here in New Mexico, so it's important for consumers to get out there and meet their brewers," he said. "Brewing is like acting. It's great work if you can get it, but the trick is staying in business."