It’s 1993 and Rob Tod had recently graduated from Middlebury College. While deciding whether to go back to school for geology or do something else, he takes a temporary job as a keg washer at Otter Creek brewing. Two days later, he knows that his time in brewing won’t be so temporary.

We’re more than excited to announce that we earned significant accolades at the 2021 Great American Beer Festival (GABF). For the first time ever, we earned the honor of Brewery and Brewer of the Year in the 15,001 – 100,000 barrels per year category.

In the fall of 2007 Rob Tod had an idea. Rob, the founder of Allagash, wanted to build a small, unheated shed with a vessel resembling a massive brownie pan inside of it. Then, he wanted to pump steaming, cloudy unfermented wort into that pan, let it sit out in the open overnight, and subsequently barrel age it for up to three years. In short: he wanted to brew with a coolship.

In 2007, Allagash had already been brewing according to key parts of Belgian tradition: using unconventional ingredients, bottle conditioning, and barrel aging. Brewing with a coolship was, oddly enough, the next logical step. When talking about spontaneously fermented beer, it’s better to think of the barrel not as a container, but as an environment. Oxygen ingress—minute amounts of oxygen allowed into the barrel by the natural pores in the wood—has a profound effect on the beer.