Category: Beer

Maine magazine has published a feature article about Allagash Brewing and its founder Rob Tod.

But, while walking back through the Allagash brewery past a door that reads: “Innovation: Continually pushing the limits of beer and ourselves,” I can’t help but feel that some magic has happened here that, if not found in the chili, must be hiding in that little sugar-hut-looking koelschip building built off the back of the brewery. There, shrouded in clouds of sweaty steam and fed by locally sourced and totally free yeast that comes through church-like stained glass windows near the ceiling, the brown, syrupy wort will be fermented and aged for another two years before being sold in little batches that usually sell out in a couple of days.

I had the pleasure of joining in on the Maine Brew Bus new breweries tour this past weekend. We visited Banded Horn in Biddeford, followed by Austin Street, Bissell Brothers and Foundation Brewing on Industrial Way in Portland. It was quite interesting to see how incredibly different the personalities of the breweries were.

Bissell Brothers will soon be canning The Substance, Foundation is about a week or two away from launching their first beer and Austin Street still seems a few months out from selling their beer.

Authors Joshua Bernstein and Kate Cone were special guests on the tour. Berstein has just published The Complete Beer Course and Cone is working to update her 1997 book What’s Brewing in New England.

Local beer writers Carla Companion (aka author of the Beer Babe) and Tom Atwell also joined in. Companion has posted a pair of reports on Austin Street and Bissell Brothers. Presumably the tour will figure into Atwell’s upcoming What Ales you column in this Thursday’s Press Herald.

For some photos check the PFM Instagram page.

 

If My Coaster Could Talk reports that state authorities have reversed their policy of enforcing the 1937 law that prevents the display of a beer’s alcohol by volume.

The back pedaling started on Tuesday when the Operations Director of the Maine Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages & Lottery announced that under an updated enforcement policy bars, pubs and tasting rooms could begin displaying ABVs (alcohol by volume) in menus and on signage at the bar or in the tasting room. The information is allowed to be displayed as long as it’s not embellished. Basically the information can be displayed as it always was as basic information about the product for sale.

The Press Herald has published an update on the recent enforcement by regulators of a 1937 law which bans bars from displaying the alcohol percentage of the beer they serve.

“(The law is) absolutely asinine,” said Greg Norton, whose store on Forest Avenue in Portland, the Bier Cellar, specializes in small-batch beer and wine. “It’s an important piece of knowledge for a customer, to plan how many beers they’re going to have that night.”

It’s unclear why the restriction was added to state law, which included rules for Maine’s post-Prohibition liquor industry with arcane terms such as “high test,” “high proof” and “pre-war strength.” Legislative documents from the time suggest it was aimed at advertisements that sold beer based solely on its strength.

Maine Today has a report on the Maine law which prohibits bars from posting the alcohol percentage of the beers they serve.

Maine Law prohibits bars from posting the ABVs. (But wait, bars all over the state post the ABVs on tap menus and chalkboards all time. Yeah. But technically, they’re not supposed to.) It’s an archaic law that’s getting a lot of attention on Three Tide’s Facebook page. When David Carlson, an owner of Three Tides, got a call from his liquor inspector saying it’s not OK to list the beers’ alcohol-by-volume numbers, he posted to the company’s page so that customers would know.

Update: See this article in the Bangor Daily News for additional reporting on the law and the efforts to change it.

So far his plea has reached the ears of several lawmakers, including Rep. Louie Luchini, D-Ellsworth, the co-chair of the Veterans and Legal Affairs committee, which deals with matters of alcohol sales. He said Friday that earlier that day he had submitted a bill request in an effort to quickly resolve the legal problem.

World of Beer has named Allagash Brewing their selection for the 2013 Brewery of the Year.

Of course, there were other [beer]s besides, many of them, but these “Best of…” posts aren’t supposed to be about the qualities of individual beers. No, they are meant to highlight the brilliance of a single brewery over the course of a calendar year, and in that regard Allagash achieved in spades, making it my no-doubt pick as U.S. Brewery of the Year for 2013.

Active Beer Geek has posted an article about Foundation Brewing, including a video interview with co-founder Joel Mahaffey.

Foundation plans on releasing two flagship beers to the market in March. One is an IPA saison called Blaze that is going to be out of this world. It’s a slightly hoppy and funky brew that uses Millenium, Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Nugget, Columbus hops making it very tasty. With Eddy you get the floral and slightly funkyness of the saison as well as the flavor and citric hop profile of an American IPA.

Foundation  hopes to start selling their first two beers, Blaze and Eddy this March.

Serious Eats has selected Allagash Merveilleux top represent Maine in their list of the 50 best beers from across the country.

Then, when everyone else was racing to see how many hops they could shove in a bottle, Allagash was one of the first to experiment with wild-fermented and sour ales. Merveilleux is the love child of those early funky beers. A blend of bourbon and wine barrel aged wild ales, Merveilleux is a wonderful example of what happens when brewers go beyond the novelty of brewing their first sour beer.

BDN beer blogger, Chad Lothian, has posted a report on his recent beer bar crawl in Portland to Salvage BBQ, LFK, Little Tap House, Nosh and Novare Res.

If My Coaster Could Talk has written a piece about Industrial Way and the role it plays as an incubator for new Portland breweries.

There is a special neighborhood in Portland, Maine, one that’s developing a pretty solid brewing history, a place that has seen a brewery start up and become one of Maine’s most successful, a place that has seen small startup breweries find their place in the Maine beer scene, pack up and move on to bigger and better things and has also been a place that has seen a brewery close its doors and now is witnessing a new batch of young breweries entering the market.

D.L. Geary, Allagash and New England Distilling are all in that neighborhood. Rising Tide, Maine Beer Co. and Bull Jager started out there, and now Bissell, Austin Street and Foundation Brewing are continuing the tradition.