When I was looking for breweries in Albuquerque there were two names that kept cropping up. On our way to Santa Fe it just so happened we needed somewhere to eat lunch. What better place than a brewpub? For those two reasons it was an easy decision to stop at the Bosque Brewing Co. Public House.
We parked our car and stepped onto the blacktop. It was a hot day with full sun. Maybe it would’ve been fine for New Mexico residents but for visitors that had just been in Minnesota and Cleveland a couple of days prior we were perfectly comfortable staying inside to eat. The Bosque Public House is located in a commercial area near the the University of New Mexico campus. It’s probably a great spot for a brewery, and I have no doubt they are usually full of people, but for lunch on a Thursday afternoon it was fairly empty. The taproom is a surprisingly large wide open space with a variety of seating. There is a u-shaped bar that anchors the entire room. It’s got wood slat walls, brewery stools, and an interesting black metal sculpture that crawls up the back wall. We chose a hightop near that bar.
Since this location is a brewpub we were presented menus and asked what we’d like to drink. I started to select the six beers of my flight while the others chose their pints. After the drink orders were in we all began to look through their full food selection. I chose the Bosque Burger. The BBQ, bacon, fried onion, and white cheddar sounded like the perfect compliment to some beer and I found out later that it did not disappoint! With the drink and food orders in I took note of the decor. It’s your standard stuff: polished concrete floors, wood slat walls, metal stools, and wood tables. Their tap list looked like a standard chalkboard from afar, but when I got close I saw that it was tiny little black squares with white type on them. Really cool! Another interesting detail on the tap list was that each beer was assigned an amount of leafs. That leaf is the Bosque logo and in this case they denoted the price point of that particular beer.
My flight consisted of the Pepperfessor Honeydew Saison, Bosque Lager, Brewer’s Boot Amber Ale, Driftwood Oatmeal Stout, and Elephant’s on Parade. After the flight I ordered a half pint of Citrone Sessions Session IPA and Hellapeno Lime Gose. My tasting notes were littered with stars! Besides having one of the best names for a beer, the Pepperfessor Honeydew had a faint Belgian sweetness, a nice cool melony / cucumber flavor, and a touch of pepper. The Bosque Lager was gone before I knew it. Super crushable and easy to drink. Brewer’s Boot and Driftwood were my two favorites. Each were great examples of their style, nothing fancy, just brewed very well with fantastic flavor. The stout had a bit of smokiness to it but nothing that overwhelmed the creamy, coconut, and chocolate flavors.
Towards the end of our visit we moved outside on the patio. By that time the umbrellas were giving us a nice amount of shade and there was a light breeze to take the edge off the heat. It wraps around their building and contains some trees and a lot of green plants that were beginning to climb their trellises. The only downside was that every time someone opened the door it got stuck on a high spot and one of us had to get up to close it! I asked our group what they thought of their food and everyone was very happy with their selections. Each person also liked their beer, and honestly it was some of the best that I had on the entire trip. I’d go back in a heartbeat!
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