Category: Beer

Allagash features prominently in an article in Wired magazine about wild-fermented sour beers.

A few miles north of Portland, Maine, inside Allagash Brewing Company’s gleaming fluorescent-lit beer factory, a heavy door leads into a climate-controlled room lined with barrels full of aging beer. Past those barrels, behind a second, smaller door, is one of craft brewing’s most sacred spaces. In here, the thrumming industrial drone of bottling lines and keg washers fades away. Wooden casks stand silent sentry. Dust hangs heavy. Cobwebs lilt. The owner of Allagash, Rob Tod, sets a small green bottle of beer on an upturned cask. Its contents were aged in this very room. He pops the cork and pours a fragrant, foamy measure into a yellow plastic KOA coffee mug.

Boston magazine has published their list of the 21 best breweries in New England. It includes Banded Horn(17), Marshall Wharf(16), Oxbow(6), Maine Beer Company(5) and Allagash(2).

Men’s Journal has posted their list of the 101 best beers in America which includes Bissell Brothers Substance and Allagash Interlude. Portland’s own Greg Norton, owner of the Bier Cellar helped assemble the list.

Finally, Maine Today has kicked off their Maine Beer Madness bracket survey.

The Press Herald reports that the state legislature is considering a bill that would enable brewers to lease excess production capacity to up to 9 tenant brewers.

Sen. Justin Alfond, D-Portland, has introduced a bill that would allow large breweries with excess production capacity to form tenant agreements with as many as nine smaller beer companies to lease brewing time on their equipment – large brewers can host only one tenant brewery now. The arrangements would lower overhead costs for host brewers and reduce taxes for tenants.

NPR’s blog The Salt has posted an article about Allagash and wild fermented beers.

The team at Allagash has been experimenting with Brett and other “nontraditional brewing microbes” (for making wild and sour beers) for about a dozen years. The first time the brewers discovered that an ambient strain of local, wild Brett had contaminated a barrel of beer, “we panicked!” Perkins recalls. “We learned quickly that the character was very unique.” So they isolated it, cultured it and created a small but ambitious wild beer program that puts Brett on center stage.

Bissell Brothers will be releasing a batch of their double IPA, Swish, in cans this Saturday starting at noon. They have 80 cases on-hand and their will be a limit of three 4-packs per person. Swish is 8% ABV and is made with Citra, Mosaic, Simcoe and Apollo hops.

Foundation Brewing will have their first production batch of Epiphany on tap at their tasting room starting at noon on Wednesday. Epiphany is an 8% ABV India Pale Ale made with Columbus, Cascade, Citra, Ella and Mosaic hops.

We indulged in our desire to create an IPA that personifies the vivid flavors that can be coaxed from the hop cone, painted on a canvas of soft malt that allows the flavors to shine through.  Extensively hopped in the kettle and in the fermentor, we spared nothing in making this beer.

The Business section in today’s Press Herald includes an article about Bissell Brothers Brewing Co.

“It was tough going and we’d truly exhausted all the money we started with and were still in a pretty big hole of debt,” Noah said. “It’s kind of cliche, but the only way to make money was to spend money. It was a tough decision at the time to drop 10 or 15 grand on that when we could barely keep the lights on, but we decided it’s what we needed to do.”

The bet, made in only two months after opening, paid off. The third fermentation tank increased their production capacity, but the lines to buy beer at the brewery continued to grow as word spread…

CNN has included Portland in their list of Up and Coming Foodie Destinations.

There are nearly 600 restaurants in the city of 66,000 — one of the highest ratios of any town in the country. Many of them specialize in fresh, local fare.

Five Fifty Five currently has a local beef tartar on the menu, as well as Gulf of Maine cod and truffled lobster mac and cheese. Hugos is doing a tasting menu that includes rabbit with Brussels sprouts, spaetzil and mustard, grilled swordfish and a cream of broccoli soup. And Piccolo is putting an Italian spin on a local pork chop, hake, and an eggplant, tomato and ricotta dish.

Food Republic has included Allagash Coolship Resurgam in their list of the 20 Big Beers of the Year.

The beer writer Joshua Bernstein introduced me to this older release at a bottle share this fall, and its funky, citrus-forward flavors have lodged firmly in my memory since. Resurgam is part of the company’s coolship program, meaning it ferments spontaneously via interaction with natural yeasts in open-air vats. It won a GABF medal in 2010 and again this year, with silver in the Belgian-style lambic or Sour Ale category.