Keeping Together

The Greenhouse Kept Its Plants

For most of a generation, the long steel-framed structure at 2908 Rufina Street sold plants. It was Santa Fe Greenhouses, then High Country Gardens, then Waterwise Gardening, a lineage of people who spent their working lives making the case that things will grow here if you choose the right things.

Averie Swanson’s first response to the building was no. She told the Santa Fe New Mexican as much: it was a greenhouse, and she wanted a brewery. She and her husband, Pat Fahey, toured it anyway, made an offer the following day, and closed in November 2023.

What they did next is the part worth knowing. They kept the frame. They kept the plants, hundreds of them, lifted and held and set back down as the work went on around them. Roughly 9,400 square feet of glass and steel now holds a brewhouse at the north end and a bar under diffused light, with growing things still doing what they were put there to do. Swanson has called the result a four-season patio, a modest way to describe a building that solves the one problem every garden in this city has, which is that the season is short. Keeping Together opened to the public on March 21, 2026.

Twenty-Eight People

The Cicerone Certification Program runs four levels. The fourth is Master Cicerone, and by the program’s own count, 28 people have ever passed it. Swanson was the seventeenth, in 2018, on her third attempt, and the third woman to do it.

Fahey holds the same certification. They met through the exam, which he was helping to administer at the time. He went on to serve as the program’s content director before becoming Keeping Together’s chief operating officer.

So two of the twenty-eight are married to each other and pour beer on Rufina Street. It is a strange and specific concentration of expertise for one greenhouse on the working edge of Santa Fe.

What She Brews

Swanson spent six years at Jester King in Austin, arriving as an intern in 2013 and leaving as head brewer with an ownership stake. Jester King built its name on spontaneous and mixed fermentation, on beer made partly by yeast that arrives on its own. She left in 2019, consulted on wild yeast programs in Chicago, and started Keeping Together there as a label years before it was a place.

The house style is farmhouse. Their own description runs from rustic farmhouse ales to crisp lagers, with mixed-culture saisons at the center. The table saison she opened with is called The Art of Holding Space, and it sits near three percent alcohol, which is to say it is built to be drunk across an afternoon rather than admired once. A seasonal saison called Waiting to Be Discovered carries cara cara orange, honey, and red chile. An imperial stout is called Secret Affinities. Swanson has said the names are intentional, often points of meditation, and after a few of them you notice she is not naming beers so much as naming states of mind.

The name of the place came the same way. Her father, a hypnotist, taught her that words put things in people’s mouths, and when she had the chance to put one in yours, she wanted a mantra rather than a brand.

The second half of the name does real work too. A small brewer’s license lets the garden pour New Mexico wine and spirits alongside the beer, and the house keeps what it calls a curated selection of non-alcoholic options. A place that expects you to stay a while has to have something for everyone who came with you.

Rufina Street

This is not the Plaza and it is not the Railyard. It is the Siler-Rufina district, the part of Santa Fe that makes things: fabrication shops, light industry, storage yards, and, a short way along on Rufina Circle, Meow Wolf. That is the landmark to orient by if you are new here. The two have nothing to do with each other beyond a street, but both are evidence that this city’s cultural life stopped being confined to its historic center some time ago.

Santa Fe Brewing Company opened in 1988 and proved a brewery could work in New Mexico. Santa Fe Spirits proved a distillery could. As Above, So Below put a still and a bar under one roof. Keeping Together is the newest of the places we track in distilleries, breweries, and bars, and the only one that was a garden first. Los Poblanos brought the same argument north from the Rio Grande valley, that hospitality can be rooted in land rather than spectacle. On Rufina, the land came with the building. The people who ran the nursery would recognize what is still alive in there.

Common Questions

Is Keeping Together in the Railyard?

No. It is at 2908 Rufina Street, in the Siler-Rufina district southwest of downtown, near Meow Wolf on Rufina Circle. The Railyard is a separate district closer to the center of town.

What kind of beer does Keeping Together make?

Mixed-culture, farmhouse-style beer: saisons first, alongside lagers and hybrid styles. New Mexico wine and spirits and non-alcoholic options are poured as well.