Baja Brewing and the Intervention of San Lucas
Baja Brewing, San Jose del Cabo, Mexico. Visited on June 30, 2017.
Tell people you’re going to Los Cabos, and they assume you’ll be sitting poolside at a resort, with a frozen cocktail in one hand and a magazine in the other. And yeah, that’s how I spent most of my vacation, but after three days of the exact same scenery, the same people, and variations on the same meal, I wasn’t relaxed. I was restless.
So, my wife and I took a shuttle to San Jose del Cabo, the smaller of two towns at the southernmost tip of the Baja California peninsula. (The other is Cabo San Lucas.) The ride is quick. We snake through traffic circles and over a bridge, sandwiched between the not-distant ocean to one side and mountains on the other. The landscape is dotted with succulents and palms. Turkey vultures glide in wide circles overhead. Cows shuffle through scrub and dogs splay on dirt under a leafy tree. Because it is the middle of the day and blazing hot, we have the van to ourselves.
The driver drops us near the main plaza. We have the town to ourselves as well. But for a handful of visitors drinking and eating on restaurant patios, the streets are quiet. We make our way to Baja Brewing. This is our main reason for coming to town. My wife posts up at the bar while I head to the courtyard with Jordan Gardenhire, the brewery’s founder.
Gardenhire, 38-years-old, is a slim redhead with an easygoing demeanor. Dressed in shorts, t-shirt and sandals, he is relaxed but not a dawdler. After we sit, I state the obvious, that he’s an American who owns a 10-year-old brewery in Mexico. I want to know, how on earth did this come to pass?
Let’s Make Mexican Beer
In 2004, a 24-year-old Jordan moved from his native Colorado to Cabo. “I wanted to learn Spanish and I wanted to learn how to surf,” he says. The idea of picking up and moving to another country wasn’t inconceivable to him. His parents were in the travel business, selling bike tours to Europe, so he had already lived in France growing up and spent time after high school backpacking alone through southeast Asia.
At the time, people were moving to Los Cabos in droves. Jordan got a job selling real estate almost immediately. “They set me up at a resort and told me to start working on my golf game. We didn’t deal with anything under $1 million,” he says. But the same restlessness that drove him to leave a corporate job in Denver persisted, and he wasn’t really into his real estate job.
Then his dad, Charlie, retired and flew down to visit. “He stayed a week. And then it was two weeks. I was like, do you even have a ticket home,” Jordan says. “And I don’t think he did, so we started talking about opening a business together.” They saw how craft breweries had taken a foothold in Colorado and decided to open one together in Los Cabos.
From the time they wrote a plan, raised money, found and renovated a location, got the necessary permits, shipped brewing equipment from the U.S. and so on, it took two years. Jordan, who had been a consistent homebrewer during college, also attended the American Brewers Guild to hone his skills. When the brewery finally opened, Jordan brewed and sold the beer. His dad, who passed away in 2008, handled the marketing and finance side. “A lot of people work for their dads. With us, it was truly a 50/50 partnership,” Jordan says.
In those early days, Jordan also received mentorship from brewing luminary Doug Odell, who helped scale/refine the recipes. “My dad somehow got a hold of [Doug], and he said if you pay me to come down, I’ll help you,” Jordan says. “We had a good time. After that, whenever he was coming to Cabo, he’d call up and see if he could come over and help brew.”
Gardenhire’s business model depended on attracting tourists and locals. But it was 2007 when the doors opened. A year later, the recession caused both those groups to dwindle. “Over the course of a month, everything came to a grinding halt,” Jordan says. “The fermenters were filled with beer, and there was nobody to sell it to, because when there are no tourists, the locals don’t have money to buy beer either.”
The Intervention of San Lucas
The economy recovered and the brewery continued to grow. In a twist of fate, the recession prompted Baja Brewing to expand into other markets in Mexico and eventually the United States. “We thought, we had better get beyond Cabo,” Jordan says. That proved a prescient decision when, a few years later, another disaster struck.
On September, 15, 2014, Hurricane Odile plastered southern Baja with 125-mph winds and slashing rain. “I was with friends at my house. We were having a hurricane party, because we didn’t think it would be that bad,” says Jordan. In fact, the windows in his home blew out. The next day, as he made the 20-minute walk to the brewery, fallen palm trees blocked the way and streets were still flooded. “The weird thing is that it was sunny and calm,” he recalls.
Two walls of the brewery had collapsed. Its windows had also blown out. The floor was covered in mud that took days to shovel clean. But the barrels and fermenters stood, miraculously, undamaged. As the cleanup effort began, Jordan’s focus turned to taking care of the workers, feeding anyone who showed up to help clear mud and move debris. The area had been hit so hard, he would drive more than a hundred miles to La Paz and back for food.
The restaurant side of the business closed for a year as it underwent renovations. Today, it’s difficult to imagine the damage. Everything looks so permanent, as if it had always been there and always will be.
Along one of the courtyard walls is a shrine to San Lucas, including a tall statue of the apostle himself. In Roman Catholic tradition, Saint Luke is a patron saint of bachelors and brewers. (In Jordan’s case, a bachelor-brewer).
The statue of Saint Luke is more than a decoration. Jordan commissioned it from a local artist named Vassi before the brewery was finished being built. “He set up a tent in the courtyard, and he would sleep all day, even while all the construction was going on. Then he would work all night,” he says.
For six months, Vassi worked. First, he mocked up a smaller version, then built a mold and cast the statue using a resin. “It has been with us since day one,” Jordan says, but not always outside in the courtyard. San Lucas used to be inside the building, closer to the fermenters. When Hurricane Odile hit, it also survived unharmed. “I think he watched over the brewery,” Jordan says.
After the hurricane, some locals simply left town forever and tourists held off. Fortunately, the brewery had expanded enough by then that it wasn’t entirely dependent on either. Not only has Baja Brewing opened several other restaurant locations, Jordan spends most of his time preparing to open a full-scale production and bottling facility in Tijuana.
Escape and Return
After giving me a quick tour of the brewery, including the room where he’s about to start a barrel program, Jordan has meetings with some other folks. That’s okay. My wife is eager for me to join her at the bar. She is reading a romance novel set in Dickensian London, where the hero and heroine chase a nefarious villain through soot-covered alleyways under grey skies. The Cabo vibe could not be more different.
I suggest we write our own romantic story. The plot? Two lovers sit on barstools, drinking beer. The conflict? They finish their glasses of beer. The resolution? They order another round. Eventually they go home together. The end.
So that’s what we do. After three and a half hours of eating and drinking and enjoying each other’s company, the sun has set and we know our friends are waiting for us at the resort. We settle the bill and head out. On the way, we notice the courtyard has filled with people, and we’re sorry we can’t stay longer.