New Mexico Breweries is a project I built because I wanted it to exist, and this is the second time I have built it. No client commissioned either one. An earlier nmbreweries.com of mine put the state’s breweries on one map; the 2026 relaunch brings that back as a real directory instead of a list: more than 120 breweries, brewpubs, taprooms and cideries from Farmington to Las Cruces, with a look at what each one is pouring.
The reason to build it was that this information keeps going stale everywhere else. Brewery lists sit on blog posts that stop getting updated, and tap lists change faster than anyone maintains a page by hand. A statewide directory is only worth having if staying current is part of the architecture.
So breweries are a post type, not entries on a page. Each is a record with an address, hours, phone and its own website, filed under a city taxonomy and sorted into breweries, brewpubs, taprooms and cideries. The map is a plugin I wrote: Leaflet with marker clustering over a muted base map, the state outline as GeoJSON, and every brewery also rendered as a card below the map so the data is never trapped inside it.
A second plugin solves the currency problem. It matches each brewery to its Untappd listing and caches the beer list into custom fields on an hourly, rate-limited schedule well under the API’s call limit. Pages never call Untappd, so the page stays fast and the data refreshes itself. Beers group by style family with ABV, IBU and rating. Events run on The Events Calendar, each brewery a venue.
Because it is mine, I could hold it to standards a budget sometimes argues with. The site publishes its own accessibility statement against WCAG 2.2 AA, including the gaps I have not closed. The patterns I work out here, a content model, a scheduled sync, an accessible map, are the ones I bring to client work next.
