Victor’s Home Brew, formerly Victor’s Grape Arbor, has been serving New Mexico and Southern Colorado for 50 years. For much of that time, Victor’s was the only home brewing supply shop in the region. Victor Trujillo purchased the business after it had been in operation for a couple of years, and turned it into a source of not only wine and beer making supplies, but also a favorite and trusted source of information on brewing and home wine making. He also established a reputation for being a hub for information exchange, sharing our successes and failures, and a great place to spend some time to visit and talk all things fermentation. Victor’s daughter, Michelle, took over the shop after Victor passed away a number of years ago and continued the traditions that Victor nurtured all those years.

Jens and Lucia Deichmann purchased the shop from Michelle in September 2014, and tried to follow in Victor and Michelle’s footsteps. Family was again an important part of running the business. Bringing his background in biology, chemistry, and winemaking, Jens also brought his teaching experience to running the business. Having a small vineyard in the South Valley, Jens won a silver medal at the State Fair competition (2014 Leon Millot-Chancellor blend) with his home-grown wine. This fueled his excitement to create a hub for people to share their knowledge with each other. After fostering the business through the craziest times that all of us have seen in our lifetimes, it was time for Jens to get his second retirement and move on to new adventures in life. Most important to Jens was to keep Victor’s in the hands of someone that would continue this local tradition of family and community.

November of 2021 brought Randy and Kristin Stevens in as the new owners of the shop. Randy’s story began with him homebrewing from equipment and ingredients he purchased from both Victor and Michelle. On one shopping excursion during Jens’s ownership, Kristin spotted a flyer for the Central New Mexico (CNM) Community College’s Brewing Technology program and encouraged Randy to sign up, which he did immediately. After decades of being a professional chef, Randy embarked on a career change which led to being hired on as assistant brewer at Turtle Mountain Brewing Company in Rio Rancho. When the opportunity came along to purchase Victor’s, it was a perfect fit for Randy. His passion for beer extends into making wine, cider, distilling, cheese, and many of the other products that you can find at Victor’s Home Brew. He hopes to foster that family atmosphere and knowledge-sharing spirit that lingers in the old walls of the shop, while supporting other small, local businesses from around New Mexico.

In September of 2024 a very helpful customer gave us the following information to add to our story.  Some dates are a little fuzzy, so those are approximate.  It is nice to know that as we are celebrating 50 years in business, it actually started much earlier than that.

In the late 60’s early 70’s a group of UNM student friends who rented a house became interested in brewing beer.  Mostly due to the efforts of Larry Hill, those students pursued that interest.  These friends were the core group that referred to themselves as Roma Boogie.  The house they lived in which was owned by the father of one of them was on Roma and a common term at the time was to boogie, as in to party.  At that time the only place in Albuquerque to purchase malt extract was Fremont’s Fine Foods.  Later, Gene Schneider who was a wine maker, started The Grape Arbor at the location of the present day Victor’s Home Brew.  Although Gene’s effort to get the Roma Boogie group to go mainstream was not successful, he was instrumental in bringing in brewing supplies and equipment.  The Roma Boogies and later the mainstream brewing group, The Dukes of Ale, created the demand for brewing supplies in Albuquerque.  Later Vic Trujillo, who was a Roma Boogie member, bought The Grape Arbor from Gene renaming it Victor’s Grape Arbor.  The reason to mention Roma Boogie so much is because of the impact it made on [our history sharer’s] life and the fact that Michelle Trujillo is wearing one of their t-shirts in the history photograph below.