by Leah Romero on
CHRIS SCHAEFER HAS SPENT YEARS figuring out how to capture the flavors of New Mexico’s arid landscape—blue corn, prickly pear, mesquite, and chile—in a bottle.
“New Mexico’s the center of the universe for me,” says Schaefer, owner of Dry Point Distillers, in Las Cruces. What started eight years ago as a hobby, distilling brandy with his father, Stephan, sparked an intense focus on local ingredients. “We ended up looking toward all the fruit and vegetables that you can find in the Mesilla Valley,” he says, noting the abundance of apricot and apple trees. “I tried prickly pears, honey mesquite [pods], and just anything that I would taste that was sweet or delicious, then I would try to ferment it and distill it.”
Eventually, the impulse to make a spirit rooted in place led to whiskey. “I wanted to have something that’s somewhat unique,” he says. Schaefer started with blue corn sourced from Southwest Heritage Mill, in Albuquerque. The heritage grain, used to make everything from earthy tortillas to atole, lends a “green, vegetal, slightly earthy” character to the mash.
More recently, he’s found New Mexico sources for the rye, wheat, and barley, allowing him to make the whiskey entirely from local grain. Even the spent grain goes to a nearby pig farmer. “It’s really cool to try to support all these smaller operations,” he says of the sustainable ecosystem.
That sense of place translates to the glass. At Dry Point’s cozy Mesilla tasting room, which opened as the town’s first in 2018, bartenders turn regional ingredients like prickly pear and pomegranate into house-made seasonal syrups, grenadine, and botanical infusions. “The Las Cruces community, I think, was ready for a place that was just focused purely on cocktails,” Schaefer says.
Over the years, Dry Point’s whiskeys, agave spirits, Mesa Vodka, and Monsoon Gin have been infused with everything from local apple cider and pecans to red chile and edible flowers. Late this summer, Schaefer was working on a cocktail with peaches harvested from a neighbor’s trees in Las Cruces. His team blended them with sugar, cinnamon sticks, clove, vanilla, and butter extract, then infused the mixture into Mesa Vodka to create a liquid take on spiced peach cobbler. “Fermented and distilled in New Mexico,” he says proudly, “consumed in New Mexico.”