This post contributed by Betsy Cook, Maine State Director of The Trust for Public Land
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
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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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?
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.
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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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.
On March 1st, a group from Oxbow came down to Portland to brew a historic grisette.
Cherries so ripe you can smell them through your screen. Seriously.
Early one morning, a few years back, our brewers were sipping coffee as they bottled up the first batch of Curieux—a barrel-aged ale. Standing in the midst of so much fragrant fluid, they couldn’t help but notice how nicely the aroma of cold press coffee went with the scent of barrel-aged beer. This gave them an idea, and thus James Bean was born.
The FV13 foudre.
Not only was FV13 aged in a foudre, but it was the first beer that Allagash brewers ever aged in one. Sure, our brewers had experience with barrel aging before FV13, but we still had a lot to learn about the mighty foudre.
Grand Cru. All of Allagash in a single tour.
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These are the New England beers you need to get into your mouth before you shuffle off this mortal coil. The kind that may require extensive planning, waiting in long lines, shadily cajoling with people, and, in some cases, accepting defeat — temporarily, of course. Exclusivity and scarcity do not in themselves make a beer good, but they can make scoring a hard-to-get beer that much more fulfilling. Set your sights on these. Read More.
We were psyched to see one of our employees, Oly, mentioned in this great article by Food and Wine! Read more here.
Portland, Maine is the best place to get a pint, according a new report from SmartAsset, a technology company that recently compiled its own list of the top 25 U.S. cities for beer drinkers. Read more.
“…an amazing thing happens when you taste beers blind; you take the brewery and the beer’s reputation out of the formula altogether, so that all there is left to judge is the beer itself. The results from some tastings were downright shocking, with newcomers besting fields of heavy weights, while other results reaffirmed our love for certain style benchmark brews. One thing’s for certain—it was a fun process.” Read More
“While cities across the U.S. have been opening quality- minded cocktail bars for the past decade, Portland—a lovely port of bricks and seagulls and the scent of the sea— seemed content to remain a city of beer bars and highballs. Restaurants intermittently rolled out a clever cocktail or two, but the city had more or less ignored the modern cocktail revolution that was infiltrating nearby Boston and beyond.” Read More
It’s been an exciting month for Coolship Resurgam!
We were so honored to take home a silver medal at this year’s Brussels Beer Challenge for Specialty Beer: Lambic and Geuze, and a silver at the European Beer Star Awards for Sour Beer!
75 judges gathered from all over the world to judge over 1100 entries for the Brussels Beer Challenge, and 105 tasters gathered from 25 countries to taste and evaluate beer at the European Beer Star Awards. Congratulations to all the medal winners and everyone who entered!
It seems like it was only recently that our brewmaster, Jason Perkins, was first contacting Doles Orchard (in Limington, Maine) about using their tart cherries for brewing. Read More
“Farmhouse ales, long the domain of Belgium and France, have been co-opted and riffed on by American brewers. Aaron Goldfarb on the ten breweries – on and off the farm-who are redefining the style.” Read More.
