Images: Ali Lamoureux
Fish fries are a staple in the Black community, going back as far as our first days on this continent. On Saturdays, enslaved people would work until noon, and some would spend the rest of the day fishing, bringing back whatever they caught for the rest of the community. That time-honored tradition still stands today, reaching across the country, gathering together friends and families for celebration and fellowship. Read More
Images by Ali Lamoureux
My holiday season usually kicks off with the sound of Karen Carpenter, the Temptations, and Johnny Mathis. Next come decorations, holiday movies, and old Christmas episodes of favorite TV shows. My husband and I move through the season checking off this imaginary to-do list. Do we have hot chocolate in the pantry? What’s our budget for gifts? Are we finally going to get around to decorating the outside of our house like “real” grown ups? And perhaps my favorite—do we have enough butter and flour? Read More
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Even before I could throw dinner parties, I loved them. As a little girl, I would cuddle up with my mom’s tattered copy of the Joy of Cooking, which had an entire section on entertaining—from folding napkins to setting the table. That book sparked an excitement for hosting that hasn’t waned. And after hosting a few dinner parties over the years, I’ve learned a few tips to mitigate any potential stress you might encounter while planning your own. Read More
Allagash Beer Battered Fish Taco Recipe
Courtesy of our friend Steph at @thisisavocado
These light and flavorful tacos are just the thing to turn a weekday night into a mini celebration. You’ll find the recipe, and cooking instructions, below.
If you love entertaining as much as I do, building a charcuterie board is one of those skills you must have in your repertoire. A good charcuterie board is welcoming, encourages experimentation, and keeps your guest busy while you put the finishing touches on the rest of the meal. Read More
The winter season ushers in shorter days and chilly weather, which on the surface doesn’t seem like much fun. But there’s so much to look forward to when winter rolls around. Read More
Blog contributed by Stephanie Grant
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This post contributed by Betsy Cook, Maine State Director of The Trust for Public Land
This blog was contributed by our friend, Jenn Bravo (@JennifahBravo).
To set the stargazing scene…
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
The brittle surface crust of the snow gives way beneath my feet, sending each footfall several inches deeper than I expect. My headlamp beam bathes a spot about five feet ahead of me in blueish-hued LED light—the rest of the world is a dark void. Read More
December 2020 Update
Black is Beautiful, our imperial stout, has truly delivered some beautiful results. Thanks to your purchase of this beer, we’ve donated a total of $10,000 to the Indigo Arts Alliance and Maine Inside Out—both organizations working to increase racial equity and showcase the talents of Black members in our community. Read More
UPDATE AS OF NOVEMBER 1st, 2020
We’ve made the difficult decision to remain closed for tours and sit-down tastings until spring. Although we miss our customers and friends—and very seriously and thoroughly considered re-opening our doors—we ultimately decided to err on the side of caution. The reality is that we are first and foremost a production facility. When we looked at the choice to not open our tasting room to guests through that lens, it became much simpler: we couldn’t confidently protect our employees and business while opening our tasting room and brewery to guests.
Please know that we’re eagerly looking forward to re-opening and are continuously investigating how to do that safely and effectively this spring. We sincerely thank you for your patience and would still love to see you at the brewery this winter for grab-and-go beer service.
We miss you too, friends. Read More
As we look back upon the first year of our partnership with Nibezun, we’re excited by the progress we’ve made and look forward to continuing our support. In addition to the $2500 grant we donated last year, our tasting room staff selected them as our Charitable Partner of the Month last October, which resulted in an additional donation of $2,776. Both of these donations helped to fund their new roof, which is the first step in preparing Nibezun for their planned solar array in the coming months. This year, we’ve made an additional $2,500 grant and plan to donate the profits from two special beers we’ll have on draft in our tasting room to Nibezun. We’ve also selected them as our Charitable Partner of the Month for October again this year. As we mention in the post below, we continue to take these steps in anticipation of more to come.
[Original post:]
Today, October 12th, is Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Maine. This holiday is the result of important work by Maine’s Indigenous Wabanaki Confederacy and their fight for legislation to have this day officially recognized. Read More
UPDATE – 6/9/2020
As part of our ongoing effort to be allies to the Black members of our community—and to raise funds for nonprofits fighting to make progress for racial justice—we’ll be donating 100% of profits from our online store all week (6/8-6/14) to BEAM (Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective), the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Maine Community Foundation People of Color Fund.
I’ve been wanting to write a public update for about a month—to give our supporters and others in the beer industry a clear picture of how we’re weathering this crisis. But each time I considered it, it felt too early. So much was in flux that it would have been like writing about a baseball game after only the first inning. Now that there’s a little more clarity around our near future, I wanted to fill everyone in on how we’re doing at Allagash. Read More
In 2019, we became a certified B Corp and the first benefit corporation in the state of Maine. Below, you’ll find our very first report. It details the various initiatives across our brewery aimed at improving the lives of our employees, the sustainability of our business, and the wellbeing of our community. Thanks for taking the time to learn a little more about us and the ways in which we’re striving to be a better brewery, every day.
Wow, thank you all for coming out. It turns out your enthusiasm for our “$1 beer for front line medical workers” offer was orders of magnitude beyond what we could have imagined. We’re sorry to say that we no longer have beer to provide. By the time we ran out, we had handed out over 11,400 cans of beer. Read More
The situation we’re now all faced with has created immense challenges for us as a brewery, and for all of us as a society. At Allagash, we’ve been lucky to have the resources and support in place to weather this situation, while also finding ways to continue to help our community. Below, in order to give our team the kudos they properly deserve, we wanted to keep a running list of some of the positive contributions we’ve been able to make to our community. We’ve also added a section at the top of this list containing ways that you can help us in supporting our community. Thanks, in advance, for your help.
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There are actually a couple reasons why breweries and bars will rinse your glass. Read More
Our favorite experiences during the Maine summers usually involve friends, Allagash White on draft, and golden hour. Now that we have two kids, we’ve found it a bit harder to make it out to those roof-top happy hours. But that doesn’t mean we can’t kick back with our friends and kids to enjoy the summer evenings together. Cue the outdoor movie night, a regular summer Sunday tradition that literally everyone looks forward to. Read More
This was Rob, our founder/brewer, on hearing his name announced as the winner of the 2019 James Beard Award for Outstanding Wine, Beer, Or Spirits Professional. “I hadn’t even prepared a speech.” Read More
What is Bellagash?
An American wheat beer, a witbier, and a hefeweizen.
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A collaboration saison from Allagash and Brasserie Dupont.
Aromas of sweet honey and caramel, a malt-forward body and hints of oak.
For the first time, bottles of Coolship Resurgam will be going out to our entire distribution footprint.
Fresh peaches. Tart beer.
If our quality control measures on our packaging line were an iceberg, the following list would be the top of the tip. Rather than list every single thing, we’ve pulled out some of the more visual ways our team makes sure that beer moves faultlessly from our tanks to a package to your hand to your stomach. Read More
“Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.”
John Ciardi
Brewing memorable beer requires artistry and imagination—just not on the brew day itself. Read More
Sounds too good to be true, right? Luckily, it’s not. We’ll lay out the basic guidelines along with some options for you to enjoy. Read More
Without further ado, here’s the wild—as in, “holy dang that’s a wild amount of beer”—bottle list for this year’s roundup: Read More
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When it comes to making a burger, those three elements are pretty much all you have to work with. That’s what makes this list of some of our favorite burgers even more impressive. And with so many great restaurants and chefs around Portland, narrowing it down wasn’t easy. Certain chefs have opted for the tried-and-true. Others have grabbed the burger idea and run sideways. Whatever type of burger you prefer, something on this list will hit your particular spot.
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Why pair beer with oysters? Well, our friend Mike Wiley, the James Beard Award-winning Co-Head Chef of Eventide Oyster Co., has a great answer to that question. Read More
However hard the process of shucking appears, the right technique and some hands-on experience will have you opening fresh oysters in no time. The steps below, and visual aids, will help you get your first oysters open. Read More
In part one of this blog series, we outlined what white beers are. Now we cover Allagash White.
We could go on about our love of lobster rolls for pages and pages, but really, we know that you just want to get to the list. To briefly disclaim: this list is not complete. There are nearly countless amazing lobster rolls across Maine. These are just some of our favorites—in no particular order or rank. We’d also encourage you to try pairing one or all of these with your Allagash beer of choice this summer (we prefer White with our lobster). We suspect you’ll be the opposite of disappointed.
Thanks to our love for exploring the wilder areas of our mutual state, we’ve had the pleasure of eating a couple meals from Good To-Go. And when we got in touch with the Good To-Go team about a pairing dinner, they were all for it.
One of the best things about working in the Allagash tasting room is simply talking to people about beer. And while talking about Coolship Resurgam (our interpretation of a Lambic-style gueuze) I’ve noticed many furrowed brows. That’s how this blog post was born.
There are two beers out there that sound sort of similar, but are actually extremely different: gose and gueuze (you’ll also see it spelled geuze). To further confuse the issue, both beers fall in the wildly varied category of “sour” beers and they both contain a pretty high portion of wheat. That’s about where the similarities end.
On March 1st, a group from Oxbow came down to Portland to brew a historic grisette.
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.
Normally, when brewing pretty much any style of beer, there are a couple things you want: clear, pure wort, fresh hops, and a well-behaved strain of yeast. Brewing spontaneously fermented beer turns those three requirements on their heads.
This past week, we held a brewery-wide tasting of cheese and Curieux. Eight cheeses, thirty-nine tasters, and much lactose later, we found consensus. Read More
