As Above, So Below: A Distillery in the Santa Fe Railyard

The gin is being made about forty feet from where you are drinking it. That is the entire difference between this and every other good bar in Santa Fe, and it is easy to miss, because the front of the building behaves like a cocktail lounge and the back of it behaves like a factory, and the wall between them is not much of a wall.

Altar

It opened in January 2022 at 545 Camino de la Familia under the name Altar Spirits, and took its current name the following year, when the owners announced they were positioning for a wider market than New Mexico. The founders are Caley Shoemaker, who is also the master distiller, and Jeff Gust.

Shoemaker’s arrival in Santa Fe is the part of the story worth slowing down for. She came into craft spirits in 2009 at Stranahan’s, the Colorado whiskey house, and in 2014 went to Hangar 1 in California to oversee construction of a new distillery, staying on as head distiller and general manager until 2020. Distillers with that resume generally do not leave to build something small in a town of ninety thousand people. She did.

The Names Are Not Decoration

“As above, so below” is a formula from the Emerald Tablet, the hermetic text that European alchemy took as its founding statement. It means, roughly, that the pattern of the heavens repeats in the pattern of the earth, and it is the sentence alchemists used to justify the belief that transformation is lawful rather than magical.

The range follows the same thread without apologising for it. A sigil is an occult sign. Aradia belongs to Italian witchcraft. Ixchel is a Maya goddess. The vodka is called Ritual. The previous trading name was Altar. There is an absinthe, which is the one spirit in the Western canon that arrived already carrying its own mythology.

None of which is a costume. Distillation was alchemical apparatus for centuries before it was an industry, and the vocabulary of the still, the spirit, the essence, and the rectification is inherited straight from that work. A distillery that names its bottles this way is being accurate about where its equipment came from.

Under One Roof

When it opened, the company described itself as one of the first places in central Santa Fe to take spirits all the way from distillation to finished cocktail in a single building. That is the operative fact.

The range runs to gin, vodka, aperitivo, a dry curacao, and absinthe, with house-made cherry liqueur and creme de violette behind the bar for the drinks that need them. The vodka is built on barley grown and malted in southern Colorado and fermented into wash at a New Mexico brewery before it is distilled here, which is a more complicated supply chain than “local” usually covers and a more honest one.

Compare it with Santa Fe Spirits, which distills in an industrial unit near the airport and pours downtown, or with Farm Shop Norte, which pours a gin distilled sixty miles away on the farm that grew it. Three arrangements of the same idea, and this is the only one where the two halves are in the same postcode, let alone the same building.

Inside the District

Camino de la Familia runs through the Railyard, between Guadalupe Street and the rail corridor, which puts this squarely inside a district that spent a century as a freight yard and now contains SITE Santa Fe in an old brewery warehouse. Making things here is not a novelty. Making them by hand, in small volumes, for people standing in the next space, is.

It works as a first drink before dinner, as a stop after an opening, and as the alternative to walking Canyon Road for the fourth evening running. For a bar built over a stage there is Tonic; for mezcal and a fire, La Reina. The absinthe is better in winter, when the year turns dark at five.

Common Questions

Is As Above, So Below a distillery or a bar?

Both, in one building at 545 Camino de la Familia. Spirits are produced on the premises and poured in a lounge at the front, and bottles are sold to take away.