PHILOSOPHY
Officially: “Loud beer from a quiet place,” which is just the kind of clever catchphrase fans have come to expect. But it’s a subtle approach, too. “We have a very specific focus: farmhouse ales,” Adams told me. “Our inspiration comes mainly from classic styles of beer, and not just those from Belgium. I drink a lot of German lagers and love them for their balance and their ability to showcase quality ingredients in the most beautiful way. We try to apply that to our take on farmhouse ales. We strive for balance and refreshing drinkability, but unlike the lagers of Germany our beers display an incredible amount of complexity from their fermentation character.”
In 2015, Oxbow launched a coolship-led sour program using the farm’s and other local fruit including raspberries, cherries, elderberries, and strawberries, for starters. “I think it’s very much in line with what we do: not being scared to take chances and to take the time to make the best possible beer we can,” Adams says. “It’s the ultimate extreme of taking chances and taking time. It’s not the road most traveled, but I think spontaneous beers are the finest out there.”
KEY BEER
Adams’s favorite, and the company flag-ship, is Farmhouse Pale Ale, a 6% ABV saison with American hops.
NOVARE RES BIER CAFÉ
4 Canal Plaza • Portland, ME 04101 • (207) 761-BIER (2437) • novareresbiercafe.com • Established: 2008
SCENE & STORY
With twenty-five rotating taps, two hand pumps, and some 300 bottles on its list, Novare Res is a craft beer lover’s refuge down an alley in the Old Port area of town off of Exchange Street. Inside the bar is an array of beer signage, warm, wood tones, exposed brick, oak barrels, and tin ceilings. Outside there’s an elevated wood patio area, which fills up on sunny days. Every May, an annual Belgian Beer fest brings nothing but Belgian brews to the taps for three weeks, and the owners—who were inspired to open the bar after extensive travels in Europe—organize frequent events year-round with noted brewmasters and extremely hard-to-find beers. The combination has resulted in a beer bar with something of a special reputation: seemingly no matter where you travel in craft beer America, people are either talking about a recent visit to Novare Res, or planning to go. According to Dan Shelton, the outspoken writer and importer of Cantillon and over 100 other very special European beers, owner Eric Michaud is running “the best beer bar in Maine,” which, coming from the famous Europhile, is no faint praise. There’s a menu of relatively simple but hearty fare (stew, sausages, artisan meats and cheeses, hot sandwiches), and ambitious desserts cooked with sought- after Belgian ales like Cantillon.
PHILOSOPHY
Novare Res means “to start a revolution” in Latin, and the owners cheekily define the bar by what it is not. It’s neither British pub (though there are dartboards and cask ales), nor German biergarten (though there are the appropriate picnic tables outside), nor Belgian bière café (though Belgophiles will love its selection). It is instead a hybrid of approaches dedicated to great beer, no matter where or how it may have been brewed. Founder Eric Michaud previously managed the Moan & Dove, and there’s a fond fellowship between the two bars.
KEY BEER
The Belgian list is deep; the creamy-bodied Moinette Blond from the makers of Saison Dupont is an enormously complex but sociable pale ale (even at 8.5% ABV) with yeasty, funky, fruity notes up front and a snappy hop finish.
MARSHALL WHARF BREWING CO. / THREE TIDES
2 Pinchy Ln. • Belfast, ME 04915 (207) 338-1707 • marshallwharf.com • Established: 2003 (bar) and 2007 (brewery)
SCENE & STORY
Located smack on the pier next to the tugs of Belfast—a fishing village first settled in 1770—the Marshall Wharf brewery was built in the town’s original granary in 2007. A combination patio- and bocce-court-equipped beer bar, seven-barrel brewhouse with eight-spigot taproom and lobster pound (so you can buy some fresh-caught on summer mornings to take home), and a twelve-tap seasonal beer garden with repurposed bus station benches and upended logs for seats, Marshall Wharf is truly a one-stop affair. There’s even a heap of oyster shells, a midden, an ancient coastal tradition. Brewing around thirty unusual styles and aging certain brews in Heaven Hill distillery barrels with increasingly assured results—especially in the IIPA, brown, stout, and Baltic Porter genres—founder David Carlson and brewer Danny McGovern have been helping remake coastal Maine’s beer scene for some time. McGovern, the former owner of Lake St. George Brewing Company and brewer for Belfast Bay Brewing Company (and a trained butcher), brought Carlson’s operation a number of interesting recipes. And Carlson’s waterfront Three Tides bar next door (which now serves seventeen Marshall Wharf beers and is sometimes known by locals as the “Lampshade Bar”) had been the first bar in Maine to serve beers from Anchor, Unibroue, and Ayinger on draft.
PHILOSOPHY
Good beer, fresh seafood, and a bocce ball court are the only necessities of life.
KEY BEER
Cant Dog, an Imperial IPA released in 2004, was one of Marshall Wharf’s early beers, and came about when Carlson and McGovern scored a haul of Simcoe hops from an Idaho brewer in distress. It’s a golden amber, 10% ABV hop bomb with such dangerous drinkability that patrons are limited to two per day.
EBENEZER’S PUB
44 Allen Rd. • Lovell, ME 04051 (207) 925-3200 • ebenezerspub.net • Established: 2004
KEY BEER
One of the country’s most celebrated beer bars, Ebenezer’s—named for a late-eighteenth-century trapper said to have survived a duel with a bear but lost an arm—is located in the attached barn of an old farmhouse on a rural golf course, meaning it will take some planning (and driver’s GPS) to reach. With its screened porch, copper-topped bar, thirty-five taps (about two-thirds Belgian) and more than 700 labels in the cellar, it’s a bucket list beer bar with well-regarded food and a reputation for impromptu, eye-popping cellar tours. It’s not just that the list is long, it’s ridiculously deep, varied, and unusual. The location makes it a pilgrimage (and it’s easy to part with a great deal of money here), but those who make the effort are rewarded.
PHILOSOPHY
“We may be located in a small Maine town, but we’ve always dreamed big. From day one, it was our goal to build the best beer pub in the world,” says owner Chris Lively, who, with his wife, Jen, is a constant presence in the bar. This translates to cheerful service and a massive selection, care for the beer on hand, and a tradition of over-the-top events and beer dinners.
KEY BEER
The house beer is Black Albert, a resinous, roasty, coal black 13% ABV Russian Imperial Stout brewed by De Struise of Belgium. Lively’s selection of large-format bottles will no doubt be tempting, too, especially for groups who make this pilgrimage, and the draft choices are beyond unusual, like a recent tapping of 2006 Cantillon Kriek, a sour Belgian ale aged with whole cherries in oak casks for up to three years before it is released.
BEST of the REST: MAINE
BISSELL BROTHERS BREWING
1 Industrial Way, Ste. 1 • Portland, ME 04103-1072 • (207) 279-0346 • bissellbrothers.com
Working in an old industrial warehouse space within walking distance of five other breweries, Bissell Brothers Brewery is one of Portland’s hottest new upstarts, thanks to sought-after cans of the Substance, a dank, 6.5% American-style IPA that caught on like wildfire in 2014, and Swish, its bigger DIPA brother. The taproom is all about uplighting, graffiti, and the ping-pong table in a back room. Anticipate and plan for long lines for beer on release days.
MAINE BEER CO.
525 U.S. 1 • Freeport, ME 04032 • (207) 221-5711 • mainebeercompany.com
Opened in 2009 just south of Exit 20 off I295, Maine Beer Co.’s tasting room affords the chance to try one of the best breweries in the Northeast. There are eight beers on tap and some brewery-only releases. Snacks from local vendors, bottles to go, and stylish swag are all available. Gaze through glass at the brewery and start with Peeper, a floral and citrusy but
dry American Pale Ale (APA) which ups the ante on the old English style. Read: more hops, cleaner finish.
THE GREAT LOST BEAR
540 Forest Ave. • Portland, ME 04101 • (207) 772-0300 • greatlostbear.com
A dimly lit British-style pub packed with ephemera and breweriana, the Great Lost Bear opened in 1979 and arguably helped Maine’s nascent brewing industry take shape throughout the 1980s. With some seventy taps, fifty of which are from the Northeast (including fifteen from Maine), it’s still a favorite destination for beer lovers in the area and tourists, and its “Allagash Alley”—a tap row proudly dedicated to the local brewer’s beers—is a nice touch.
MASSACHUSETTS
GOING BACK TO THE DAYS OF THE MAYFLOWER AND THE FOUNDING FATHERS, BEER HAS LONG played a central role here. Today the earliest breweries are long gone but thanks in part to Jim Koch, the energetic founder of Boston Beer Company, the homegrown tradition is alive and well. “Boston was one of the original brewing centers in the United States,” explains Koch on a recent afternoon visit to his south Boston headquarters, a renovated, 25,000-square-foot brewery that gets about 50,000 thirsty visitors per year. “The first brewery in the English colonies was built here in Boston, in 1635, the year before Harvard was founded,” he says. “I guess you can’t have college if you don’t have beer.”
Koch, a sixth-generation brewmaster who holds BA, MBA, and JD degrees from Harvard, describes why beer has always been so important to Boston life. “From the day the Pilgrims landed, beer was a part of the social fabric here,” he says. “For one, it was a nutritional necessity; water was polluted. By the 1600s, one of the duties of the president of Harvard was for his wife to brew beer—for the students. Today there’s a street in Cambridge called Alewife. There was even one president who got kicked out—because his wife made bad beer,” Koch says.
Flash-forward 100 years, at which point Boston was welcoming waves of European immigrants, including scores of brewers. “At the turn of the twentieth century, there were thirty-one breweries inside the city limits, mostly in this area,” says Koch. Inspired by Samuel Adams’s story, Koch decided on the Boston area to carry on the family tradition. “The whole idea was insane. No one had heard of microbrews,” Koch remembers. “Back then, the whole beer world was mass-produced domestic beers: Bud, Miller, Coors, and imports. There was nothing else.”
BOSTON BEER COMPANY
30 Germania St. • Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 • (617) 983-9036 • bostonbeer.com • Established: 1984
SCENE & STORY
A tour of Boston Beer Company paints the picture of a remarkable craft brewing story. Starting in 1984, Jim Koch (and two business partners he met at Harvard) has built what is now the nation’s largest craft brewing company, if you accept the metrics put forth by the Brewers Association (six million barrels). The Boston facility operates as a test brewery and barrel aging facility; the firm’s commercial beers are brewed elsewhere. Through a remarkable combination of a great story and a standout recipe (the recipe for Boston Lager was based on a recipe created by his great-grandfather, Louis Koch), quality control, timing (the microbrewing wave was simmering nationwide), ready investment capital, hard work (he pounded the pavement and learned to drive a forklift himself), Koch and company created a barnburner of a brand and haven’t looked back.
Today, more than 800 local bars serve the company’s beers (and tens of thousands nationally). The company’s lineup has expanded to dozens of styles, including one bi-annual release that ranks among the world’s strongest: Utopias, a costly elixir aged for years in oak barrels and costing hundreds of dollars per bottle. Visitors wend through display cases brimming with medals, accounting sheets from the early days, and prototype bottles before settling in with some tasters at a small bar area. It’s hard to believe how much has changed in America’s brewing scene in just twenty-seven years. A Cincinnati native, Koch is proud of the role he’s played in the advent of craft-brewed beer in Boston and around the country. In 1989, Boston Beer Company was cranking out some 60,000 barrels of beer. In 2015, that number stands at more like $4 million annually; Koch became a certified billionaire in 2013. That’s billion.
“In a lot of ways, American craft brewers have become sort of the Noah’s Ark of the world’s brewing traditions,” Koch says. “We are preserving and developing them here at the same time as they are dying out in their home countries,” he says. “I’d like to think that we’re one of the few pioneers of the industry left that still has that passion for innovating, experimenting, and pushing the envelope.”
PHILOSOPHY
No stone unturned. There are plenty of Sam Adams beers that aren’t all that good, but for all the experiments and misfires, there’s an overall ratio of excellence. A couple of years ago, Koch had a 500-pound bale of fresh hops delivered, literally picked off the vine earlier in the day, which is a remarkable feat (the flowerlike cones, which are best when fresh, give beer its bitterness, aroma, and aftertaste, and must be carefully kiln-dried and packed into bales for shipment).
Even more remarkable? Koch only uses delicate European noble hops. As the vividly fresh, spicy tangy smell of Hallertau Mittelfrüh hops infused the room, Koch described how the Stanglmair clan, a hop-growing family in Bavaria supplying the hops used in Boston Lager, had helped him arrange an unprecedented air drop so he could be the first American brewer to brew with European hops picked the same day. It was a stunt, sure, but one that underscored his daring side, and one that guaranteed an extraordinarily aromatic finish to a batch of pilsner already steaming out of the copper-clad kettles. Chalk it up to old-fashioned Yankee optimism, and Koch’s flair for marketing the craft of brewing.
“It’s a lot of work for 700 cases of beer,” he added, making an obvious point, but one that truly illustrates what separates craft brewers—the revolutionaries of beer making—from the old guard. “To me, it’s like a responsibility. We’re big enough so we have the resources to try something like this, yet we’re still small enough to be crazy. That’s what makes it fun.”
KEY BEER
Koch has overseen the development of some 100 different beers of almost every conceivable style and some that didn’t really exist before, for better or worse. But it’s still the Samuel Adams Boston Lager, a smooth, 4.9% ABV lager now ubiquitous in the United States that has held up the best since it was introduced in 1985, when it won a GABF gold medal mere weeks after Boston Brewing Company opened for business. It’s a spicy, malty, and faintly nutty-fruity elixir with a gorgeous, new-penny color, fluffy white head, and smacking dry finish.
MYSTIC BREWERY
174 Williams Ct. • Chelsea, MA 02150 (617) 466-2079 • mystic-brewery.com • Established: 2011
SCENE & STORY
Fascinated by preindustrial techniques yet trained in biotechnology, fermentation scientist Bryan Greenhagen founded Mystic Brewery in 2011 after a honeymoon in beer-blessed Belgium. Living in greater Boston’s Mystic River Valley, he also knew he wanted his beers to reflect the time and land and place they came from. Inside the brewery’s “Fermentorium,” Greenhagen and Co. ferment wort (brewed offsite and transported to their facility) with wild yeast propagated from wild Maine blueberries and Vermont grapes, among other sources. In 2013 Mystic opened a beer café, bringing their rustic saisons (and charcuterie) to the suburbs of Boston.
PHILOSOPHY
Says Greenhagen, “In a world of ingredient homogenization, we aim to brew beer using the methods used for thousands of years, before modern industry. In that effort we’ll develop exciting and distinctly local new styles.”
KEY BEER
Vinland Two, fermented using native yeast from a Maine lowbush blueberry was delicious, and took gold in the Indigenous category at the 2013 GABF.
A BEER WITH
THE BOSTON BOY: JIM KOCH
“Boston’s a great beer town because it’s a community that combines so many different elements. It’s a basic, blue-collar town, with the neighborhoods like Southie and Charle
stown that you see in the movies—those are real places. You’ve got Good Will Hunting going on there. And Boston’s also the world’s center of higher education. Boston is able to put them together in this extraordinary way.
That’s the essence of beer. Beer is democratic; beer is the alcoholic beverage equivalent of Andy Warhol’s Coke bottle. People asked him, ‘Why a Coke bottle?’ And he said, ‘This is an icon that is uniquely American.’ Because in America no matter who you are—you can be Bill Gates, you can be Barack Obama, or you can be the janitor at the elementary school—everybody in the country gets the same Coke. Beer is that way, too. No matter who you are, you cannot get a better Sam Adams Boston Lager than anybody else.
If you have to leave the brewery and find another place to drink, you don’t have to go very far. Just down the street is a bar called Doyle’s. Doyle’s has been a bar since the 1880s. It’s owned by a family of Irish guys—wonderful people—the Burkes. They grew up running bars, and their dad had the beer concession at the zoo. All they ever wanted to do was run a great bar, and they’ve done that. It’s this complete, wonderful melting pot, what a bar should be. That’s where Ted Kennedy used to spend St. Patrick’s Day. Mayor Flynn [Boston mayor from 1984 to 1993] went to Doyle’s. I was there once when Mayor Flynn was tending bar on Saturday night. If there were a real Cheers bar, it would be Doyle’s.”
The Great American Ale Trail (Revised Edition) Page 30