Turtle Mountain close to opening expanded brewery with 26 year anniversary

RIO RANCHO — “Beer, beer, glorious beer,” as Alfred P. Doolittle sings in “My Fair Lady,” and Rio Rancho’s Turtle Mountain is bringing more of it.

Nico Ortiz, the brewpub’s owner, confirmed the expansion of the brewery at the Turtle Mountain North location is very close to being ready for use.

“We’re not quite operational yet. We’re still waiting for final inspections and a little bit of final tinkering with the electrical, but it’s mostly done,” he said March 24.

While the brewery is not yet operational, all tanks and machines are now at the North location.

“We took everything from South, but the serving tanks are still there. We’re going to move them this week,” Ortiz said.

Besides the existing tanks, Ortiz added several brand new tanks, a new glycol tiller and a new boiler. There are some other beneficial improvements as well.

“The original brewery, I think it’s like 1,700 square feet. This is 4,500 square feet. We have garage doors to get stuff in and out,” he said.

He said a vast majority of the issues Turtle Mountain had at the Southern location were fixed by moving the brewery to the north location.

“The old brewery was shoehorned into the back of the building — no way to easily get stuff in and out. The walls and the doors and stuff were built around the brewery. So, if we had to get anything out, we had to remove walls. There was no room for additional tankage. The cooler was too small. Our grain room was too small,” he said.

With the capacity to make more beer, Ortiz has also invested in water softener for it.

There is also a designated area to wash kegs, an office space and a large cool room added with the expansion.

The project took two years and cost Ortiz a pretty penny to get it done. He first estimated the amount to be $400,000 but ultimately spent around $250,000 more than that.

These improvements are worth the investment, according to Ortiz. The customer will notice a difference when getting beer at Turtle Mountain.

“These tanks right here and then that one in the corner, these are called brite tanks. They’re a secondary tank,” he said. “So these are fermenters. This is where the primary fermentation happens, but once the primary fermentation is done, at the old brewery, we would transfer it directly from a fermenter into a serving tank and it would sit there a certain amount of time.”

The problem, according to him, is that method wasn’t economically sound. Beer, he said, has to age after it leaves the fermenter before it goes on tap, and because of that shorter process at the old brewery, not all beer was available to sell.

“These tanks right here allow us a place to park beer, doubles our capacity so we can have these types all full and at primary fermentation and each of these tanks matches up to a fermenter, and so we can actually have double the amount of beer in process at any given time,” he said.

Ortiz said the beer will age in the in the brite tanks until it is ready. Then once it is ready is transferred into the serving tank, and Turtle Mountain starts selling it right away.

“That means that every single serving tank that we’re going to be moving in there will not have to age beer as soon as the beer goes into the serving tank. It’s ready to sell, and we can start pouring it,” he said.

This process will especially help the lagers they offer and keeping ales at optimum temperature, he said.

“People should notice that the beers are going to be better. In addition, we spent a ton of money on the water softening system. So, we actually have a way to control the water, so we’re not just at the mercy of what comes out of the well in Rio Rancho,” he said. “It’s a water softener that strips out the chlorine, takes out a lot of the flavors in the water that might go through to the final beer.”

He clarified that it will still be the same system with the same ingredients but that the beer will taste “cleaner.” His goal is to have beers that don’t “taste rushed” or “green.”

“If you have a trained pallet, it tastes green. It tastes like it’s young, and it should have sat for a little longer. And you know, we were rushing our beers on tap because we simply had to,” Ortiz said.

The expansion will not only improve flavor but bring a larger variety of them to Turtle Mountain customers. Prior to the expansion, Ortiz only had six tanks for beer; now he has 12. Because of this, he said, customers will notice more lagers, some Bohemian or German pilsners and gravity beers.

Ortiz was excited to try barrel-aged beers as well. He said Turtle Mountain is going to be experimenting with new flavors.

An important thing to note, according to Ortiz, is costs will remain the same.

“Rio Rancho is still a working-class community,” he said. “I’m not going to penalize our customers for my having to invest in in a fancy new brewery.”

That’s not to say that prices won’t increase if the market demands it, though, he said. Turtle Mountain remains competitive with its peers.

“Hopefully, people are going to recognize that that we have a wider variety and a much better product, and they’ll come in and they’ll drink more beer,” he said.

Ortiz isn’t stopping with this expansion, either. He said there are some other things to look forward to as Turtle Mountain rounds out its 26th year. Some things that went away during COVID-19, like Turtle Mountain’s wholesale license, will be returning, which will sell by the keg and the draft.

Restaurant hours at the north location will be changing as well. Ortiz said that due to staffing issues, they hadn’t been able to open on Tuesdays. Now, it is looking like more of a possibility.

He said with more beer there are more possibilities. One possibility is Turtle Mountain’s ability to do more events in the community.

“We used to do beer pairings and brewers dinners,” he said. He’d like to do more local festivals and events, too.

For now, customers and fans can keep an eye on the Turtle Mountain social media. Ortiz says they will announce when the first batch of Turtle beers from the new brewery are available. He hopes that they can get it started within the month.