Rowley’s Farmhouse Ales, an award-winning brewery and restaurant off the Cerrillos Road alignment of Route 66 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by spring will move across town into a restaurant space at the Pecos Trail Inn at another Route 66 alignment.
Rowley’s Farmhouse Ales has spent 10 years at its current location at 1405 Maclovia St., about a block off the Cerrillos Road alignment.
Dark Side Brew Crew, a website devoted to the microbrewery scene in New Mexico, recently got the scoop from co-owners and founders John Rowley and Jeffrey Kaplan.
On July 1 of this year, RFA’s lease was up. The landlord had hit them with a steep increase […] For RFA, the increase was simply too steep to make staying make sense anymore.
“We like the space, it’s just that we need to fill seats to stay in business,” Rowley said. “So, if he’s going to jack our rent, and the economy is going to screw us, and people aren’t going out as much, this isn’t the right spot for us anymore.”
The Cerrillos Corridor has been exceptionally challenging for Rowley Farmhouse Ales in recent years. They’ve had to deal with robberies, a huge fire that destroyed much of their supplies and equipment, and, tucked away behind the former AutoZone, they’ve been hard to find even for locals on this side of town. […]
A few years ago, the new owners of the Pecos Trail Inn put a lot of money into renovating the Highway 66 motor lodge which includes 23 rooms and a pool area. Not too long after, the inn was searching for new tenants for its just-under-5,000-square-foot restaurant, currently known as the Pecos Trail Café. Around the same time, RFA was searching for a new location.
The new space will give the brewery and restaurant more options, but it will remain Rowley’s Farmhouse Ales.
Rowley’s plans to open at the new location in spring 2027, with no interruption in operations.
The brewery has been a two-time gold medalist at the Great American Beer Festival and was named Small Brewpub and Small Brewpub Brewer of the Year in 2019.
The Pecos Trail Inn opened in 1955 as the Town House Inn. It was renamed the Pecos Trail Inn sometime in the 1960s.
(Image of a meal at Rowley’s Farmhouse Ales via Facebook; image of the Pecos Trail Inn by Paul Cooper via Flickr)