Second Street Brewery: Santa Fe’s Original Craft Brewery, Three Decades In

Walk into the Rufina Taproom on a Friday night and the place is doing several jobs at once: a band is set up under string lights at the back, a family with kids is sharing green chile cheeseburgers at one of the long communal tables, and the bar is two-deep with people ordering pints of Kölsch and Vienna Lager. This is what Second Street Brewery looks like after thirty years — a working-brewery-meets-neighborhood-living-room that has quietly become one of the city’s defining gathering places.

Second Street Brewery opened in 1996 in an unassuming warehouse at 1814 Second Street, on a stretch of light industrial blocks south of the Railyard. Founding brewmaster Rod Tweet’s idea was modest: brew fresh beer and serve it by the pint to a loyal local crowd. The original location ran on a 10-barrel system for more than two decades and built the kind of devoted following that turns a brewpub into a fixture. The original closed in March 2022, but by then Second Street had already become something bigger than any one address.

Two locations, two different nights out

The two taprooms still in operation each have their own character, and locals tend to pick one based on what kind of evening they want.

Second Street Brewery at the Railyard sits inside the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Building at 1607 Paseo de Peralta, on the north end just south of REI and across the tracks from the Violet Crown cinema. It opened in the early 2010s and became the brewery’s downtown-adjacent option — convenient for a beer after the Saturday farmers’ market, a pre-movie pint, or the end of a Railyard gallery walk. The patio looks out toward the rail line, and the menu leans into pub classics and New Mexican plates.

Rufina Taproom, at 2920 Rufina Street, opened in 2017 and is the brewery’s production headquarters — a 20-barrel three-vessel system that also packages the cans and bottles you’ll find on shelves around northern New Mexico. It sits less than a mile from Meow Wolf, which makes it a natural pairing: dinner and a pint after a House of Eternal Return visit, or a destination on its own for the live-music nights that run nearly every week. Rufina has the bigger room, the more ambitious music calendar, and a tap list that often includes one-offs you won’t see at the Railyard.

The beers worth ordering

Second Street has a deep lineup, and the easiest way to sort through it is to know which beers have actually won. The brewery’s most decorated styles are surprisingly traditional rather than trend-chasing:

• Vienna Lager — gold medal at the World Beer Cup. Toasty, copper-colored, clean. The kind of beer that wins competitions because it’s hard to brew well, not because it’s flashy.
• Brown Ale — gold at the 2020 Great American Beer Festival and again at the World Beer Cup. Roasty without being heavy, easy to drink across a long dinner.
• Kölsch — silver at the World Beer Cup. A crisp, golden German-style ale that’s been a year-round Santa Fe favorite for decades.
• Trebuchet IPA — silver at the 2016 World Beer Cup in the Imperial IPA category. Bigger and more bitter than the Brown Ale or the Kölsch; the hop-forward option in the lineup.
• Oktoberfest — a GABF silver medalist in the German Märzen category, on tap seasonally in the fall.

If you want a fast read on the brewery’s range, order a flight and put the Vienna Lager, the Kölsch, and the Brown Ale next to each other. That’s three different award-winning takes on three classic styles, all from the same brewhouse.

The food, the live music, and what to bring the kids to

Both taprooms run full kitchens, and the menus are broader than the standard brewpub burger-and-wings template. Pub classics share space with green chile cheeseburgers, New Mexican plates, vegetarian options, and a real kids menu — not an afterthought of chicken tenders. The Rufina room is the more family-friendly of the two on most weekends, with enough space that a stroller and a band can coexist.

The live-music programming is one of the things that keeps Second Street feeling more like a community space than a beer destination. Rufina runs free concerts most weeks, mixing local Santa Fe musicians with touring acts; the Railyard hosts smaller shows and special events. There is no cover at either, and the calendar gets posted on the brewery’s social channels and website.

Where is Second Street Brewery in Santa Fe?

Second Street Brewery operates two Santa Fe taprooms. The Railyard taproom is at 1607 Paseo de Peralta, inside the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Building, walkable from the Plaza and the Railyard district. The Rufina Taproom and production brewery is at 2920 Rufina Street, less than a mile from Meow Wolf on the west side of town. Both are open daily; the original 1814 Second Street location closed in March 2022. Tap lists, kitchen hours, and the current music calendar are posted at secondstreetbrewery.com.

Why it still matters thirty years in

Santa Fe has more breweries now than it did in 1996 — that’s the point of having one for thirty years. What Second Street has held onto is harder than opening a brewery: the sense that a brewpub is supposed to be where regulars and visitors end up sitting at the same long table, where the beer is genuinely good without making a show of itself, and where you can bring the kids early and stick around for the late set. Three decades of medals from the World Beer Cup and the Great American Beer Festival are the easy story. The harder story is that the rooms still feel like Santa Fe.

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