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Photo / Dylan Martin
Andy Hazen of Andrew's Brewing Co. in Lincolnville.
It's a Friday afternoon and a group of 12 tourists from out of state have committed a six-hour block of their day, and $65 each, to tour through York County. In exchange for making such a commitment, the group gets the honor of riding a bright green short bus called Mabel that aims to give them a mini-history lesson in a hopping and literally intoxicating Maine industry: craft beer.
The tour through York County, appropriately called "Southern Comfort," is just one of 11 brewery tours offered by the Maine Brew Bus, a Portland-based tourism company that has joined countless other businesses in simultaneously supporting and benefiting from the state's growing craft beer industry.
Passing a patchwork blur of amber and orange foliage, Mabel drives south on Interstate 95 to catch four breweries in York County. That includes SoMe Brewing Co. in York, one of Maine's 35 breweries in 2013 that were surveyed in an economic impact study by the Maine Brewer's Guild, the trade group that represents the state's breweries. The study, released this year, found that those breweries sold $92.6 million in beer last year and were set to double production by 2018.
While the tourists wait for the bus to reach the next brewery, a tall, jovial figure is standing in front, facing back at them, with the driver to his side. His name is Adam Callaghan, and he's the trip's tour guide, or as he describes himself, the guidance counselor of the tour — but given his demonstrated knowledge of Maine's beer history, a beer-guzzling encyclopedia would be a more accurate title.
As any good Maine historian does, Callaghan tells the tourists — who hail from several states, including California and Pennsylvania, and one Canadian province — about the state's prohibition history and how it outlawed the sale of alcohol for five years in the 1850s and set the bar for the National Prohibition Act, which became law in 1919 and was ultimately repealed in 1933.
In a move that would make former Portland Mayor Neal Dow, the "Father of Prohibition," spin in his grave, the state has come a long way in becoming one of the emerging destinations for the craft beer industry, nearly doubling Maine's breweries from 35 in 2013 to more than 60 this year. It's almost as if the industry's growth was a sneeze finally released after waiting for many decades to rebuild.
"Now we're making up for lost time," Callaghan tells the tourists.
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