By Nasia Jones, Staff Reporter
CNM is currently in the visioning process of building a commercial scale brewery, said full time Brewing and Beverage management instructor, Nick Jones.
Students will be brewing batches between 50 and 150 gallons using the same equipment that would be used in a brewery that brews 1,000 or 2,000 gallon batches, Jones said.
Currently our capabilities limit us to 3-gallon batches, but we still use lots of other commercial-scale equipment wherever we can, such as our laboratory equipment and draught beer equipment, Jones said.
It will make us less dependent on other breweries around Albuquerque to host our classes, Jones said.
Currently, all of the experience that our students get on commercial-scale brewhouses has to be during field trips to breweries around town, he said.
I wouldn’t expect the project to be finished for at least another couple of years, Jones said.
CNM is already creating its own beer, but whatever doesn’t get used within the program gets dumped down the drain, he said.
There are various reasons that we currently don’t sell it in stores, but I can’t think of a single reason that would absolutely preclude selling beer in the future, he said.
I suppose that we’ll just have to wait until an entrepreneurial student taking BA 2103 takes the time to develop a business plan that overcomes all of the logistical, regulatory, and financial hurdles, Jones said.
