What was Blue Clover Distillery?
Blue Clover Distillery was a restaurant with a still in the back. It opened in late February 2018 at 7042 E Indian School Road, the corner unit of a small strip center at Indian School and Marshall Way in Old Town, in the building that had been Eddie’s House for nine years. When Eddie Matney sold in 2017, New Times’ year-end roundup recorded only that “a new concept called Blue Clover” would replace him.
The concept was a working micro-distillery inside a full-service restaurant. Part-owner Weston Holm, an Albuquerque native and the older brother of MMA bantamweight champion Holly Holm, ran the place day to day and did the distilling. He had spent nine years in the offshore oil industry and told New Times that refining and distilling “are a similar process.” His partners were Duane and Scott Koch, a father and son who own a construction company in New Mexico, and master distiller Scott Wagner of Geyser Distilling helped set up the program.
Two copper pot stills, of 100 and 30 gallons, stood visible behind the dining room. The first product was a carbon-filtered corn vodka, about a week from grain to bottle and sold at the bar for $22 a 750-milliliter bottle, with a gin in the works and an agave spirit promised. The room was modern industrial: a poured-concrete bar, blond-wood slab tables, Edison bulbs, and a big covered patio facing the Segway tours on Indian School Road.
The kitchen belonged to chef Cruz Robles, formerly head chef at Pedal Haus Brewery, who called it “a total scratch kitchen.” The menu leaned New Mexican, with green chiles Holm drove in from Albuquerque. Blue Clover ran for almost six years and closed in late 2023; its successor, One Handsome Bastard, kept making the spirits in the same room.
Our verdict: a good idea that was early, a distillery-restaurant in the middle of the bar district, and one whose spirits outlived its name.
What the bar and the kitchen served
Drink the house vodka first. In 2018 Blue Clover was distilling only its corn vodka, and the bar built the list around it. The best seller, according to New Times, was the Mule Kick: house vodka, lime juice, ginger syrup and ginger beer in a heavy copper mug embossed with the Blue Clover logo, which you could take home for an extra $3. Bar manager Lex Rios rewrote the cocktail list constantly, and Holm said they were refining it daily.
Ask about the infusions. The bartenders steeped local lemons, grapefruit and chiles in the vodka while it was still at 190 proof, which pulled the flavor out of the fruit within a day, then proofed it down to 80. A resident mixologist who went by Ferris explained the method to New Times. A gin followed; later descriptions of Blue Clover Gin list blood orange, rose and peach as its main botanicals, light on juniper and heavy on fruit.
Eat the green chile. Robles’ menu was casual and New Mexican in spirit, sourced locally where possible. Green chile turned up in the mac and cheese, a poke bowl and the cheeseburger, and the happy-hour bargain was green-chile cheese fries: fries under chile con queso, cotija and green chiles, finished with cilantro and pico de gallo.
Timing. Happy hour ran Monday through Friday, 3 to 6 p.m., and Phoenix Magazine gave it a happy-hour feature in 2019. Opening hours in 2018 were 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, to midnight Thursday through Saturday, and to 9 p.m. Sunday. For the drinking side of the district then and now, see our happy hour guide.
Getting there. The building sits west of Scottsdale Road at Marshall Way, on the northern edge of the gallery blocks and a short walk from the Stetson Drive bars, which made it an easy first or last stop on an Old Town night rather than a destination of its own.
The corner that kept its stills
The corner of Indian School and Marshall Way has gone through three owners in less than a decade, and each one kept something from the last. Eddie’s House opened there in 2008 as Eddie Matney’s big-hearted Old Town comeback, survived a Chapter 11 filing in 2014, and closed after Matney sold in June 2017. Blue Clover took the space that year; a Phoenix Magazine preview in the fall expected it in November, and it opened in late February 2018.
The pitch was novelty with a craft argument behind it. Old Town had breweries, wine bars and cocktail rooms by 2018, but a restaurant distilling its own spirits behind the dining room was new, and One Handsome Bastard’s owners would later describe Blue Clover as “Old Town Scottsdale’s first and only micro-distillery.” Holm had come to distilling from five years of home experiments, and his Albuquerque roots gave the menu its green-chile accent.
What the record does not say is why it ended. New Times’ December 2023 roundup said only that Blue Clover “has closed, but similar concept One Handsome Bastard Distillery has moved in,” and that the new owners planned to keep making the spirits and donate 10 percent of the profits from them to the fight against cancer. Blue Clover’s website said its journey would continue “with a new name and a bold new vision.” One Handsome Bastard, owned by mother and daughter Trish and Bren Ritchie, opened in February 2024 and distills on site in partnership with Blue Clover Spirits. In 2024 Blue Clover Gin won a gold medal from the online spirits guide The Fifty Best, a year after the restaurant that created it had closed. Trish Ritchie credited the recipes to Holm.
Honest assessment: Blue Clover was a solid neighborhood bar with an unusual engine. It never became a dining destination, and the coverage we found is mostly about the stills and the happy hour rather than the food. But it gave Old Town a distillery, and it is the rare closed Scottsdale restaurant whose best product is still made in the same room. See One Handsome Bastard for what the corner is now, and our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale for where it sits among the district’s rooms.