Maine Beer Company (Black Barn Program)

I tweeted at them yesterday, still no response

Edit: They just replied!

 

How does Dinner hold up?

I have a bottle in the fridge from December.

 

In my experience it holds up very well. I often end up with some older bottles in my fridge and always still enjoy. Not being a new style hazy brew is probably the main reason it can hang out for a while.

 

I will agree with @jhavs somewhat, but 7 months is certainly pushing it. I try to drink all mine within a month or two at most.

 

I went to the brewery this weekend and it was very impressive. They really do a great job. It was busy but not overcrowded, went on Sunday and was there from about 11:30 until 1 or so. Might have been the cleanest place I've ever been, their staff is constantly cleaning up tables and wiping things down.

We had the pretzels and the pizza. Pretzels were very good but the pizza was excellent. Just super tasty and well made. If I lived nearby I'd probably go there regularly just to hang out and eat (and have beer). The fridges were full when we got there and there was a lot gone when we left.

We spent Saturday at many of the Portland breweries and surprisingly MBC might have been the one I enjoyed the most. It was a much less hipster crowd IMHO at MBC vs pretty much every other brewery in Portland. It's not that Portland was full of hipsters but that the ratio of hipsters was higher. It was early in the day so perhaps that was the difference.

The beer was very good, I had the black barn project #3 there and brought #2 home. #3 wasn't anything to write home about but supposedly #2 is the favorite of the staff. Looking forward to trying it.

So all in all I really love the brewery and would go there again when I get the chance. The problem is still with the price of the to-go beer. I bought 24 bottles of MBC of mixed beers, I don't have the receipt in front of me but I spent around $180 which included 2 glasses and a few other odds and ends that weren't beer. 24 Dinner would be about $192 so let's even say I spent $150 on the 24 beers. I bought 24 beers at Bissell Brothers for around $100 (if I bought all DIPA's it would have been $102). So MBC is slightly more beer but basically you are comparing 24 beers vs about 25.3 beers. A true comparison would be the $102 vs $192 because it would be DIPA vs DIPA. In general I'd probably say I prefer Bissell over MBC regardless of cost but even if they were even its hard to justify paying such a premium for MBC. This is a bit of a dead horse but the cost thing really kills it. Their keg prices are a better deal but still so much higher than the competition. If I was really into MBC I'd definitely buy it only on keg but I honestly can't see how anyone is a regular drinker of MBC given the costs and so many other options out there. Maybe after I drink a bunch of it now I'll change my tune, a beer or two here or there makes it hard to judge but after a few you start to realize all the nuances. I certainly have more MBC than I've ever had at once by a huge margin so I'll reserve final judgement Judging brewery alone though, its one of the best I've been to and would highly recommend it.

 

A little late on the reply for this question but I've now had Black Barn number 2 and 3. #3 was an IPA and #2 was an English Bitter. As I mentioned in my previous post #3 was OK but #2 was excellent. Its not a style I am very experienced with so I can't really give a quality review on it other than state that it was a well made beer and tasted great. Outside of Dinner and Second dinner its probably my favorite beer of the beers I bought while I was there.

 

Nice, thanks! I've actually heard it's a staff favorite and as I'm up in Maine now I might find the time to haul up to Freeport to grab a couple...cheers!

 

I generally hate on MBC for their horrible pricing model, but BB #1 was very very good. Had that “Focal Banger” *POP* to every sip

 

Just found Another One in a Whole Foods in LA, and picked up a bottle for about 8.99.

Bottled 06/26, so not too bad.

I'm sipping on it right now. It's strangely conflicting to me so far, I get a bit of a rusty old beer bitterness and smell that just reeks of old beer, but lurking behind is a faint whiff of that dank, manurey hop profile I look for in NE Ipas but rarely find and a clean mineral body. Very bitter finish. Beautiful pale yellow color.

 

Manurey hop profile... gonna have to force that out of my mind before I drink my next beer.

 

I’ve had that beer many times. It’s not truly a NE IPA-style IPA, despite the fact that it’s an IPA from ME. MBC doesn’t make the hazebro type of IPAs. And your description of it is...not at all how I’d describe it. And it’s not really that old, not quite a month. But hey, your senses are your senses, so I can’t say you’re wrong, just...original. But manure? Never had anything faintly taste or smell like manure in a clean fermentation. If the beer had Brett, I could understand that description.

 

I don't think brett has that quality. It is something I get from certain NE style IPAs. Recently, from HF simcoe single hop IPA, and Focal Banger. It's a peculiar hop profile that I really like, very dank, earthy and yes, reminiscent of barnyard / manure. Some herbs have a overlapping aromatic component, like Huacatay imo. But it is unique and rare to get in beers. HF gets it most regularly. Other Half on occasion as well.

I know that beer is not a "hazy beer". To me NE style should not be conflated with the haze extreme you get from Trillium, Tree House, Tires Hands, et al. Alchemist and HF do some 'cleaner' NE style IPAs. I was thinking more of a hop profile I get from the NE region than the haze itself.

I also acknowledged its bottling date.

 

Hey we all get the taste and aromas that we get. I just don’t get the same tastes and aromas as you. I’ve just never heard anyone describe Another One the way you have.

But I disagree with your assessment of what makes a NE IPA. MBC beers ain’t NE-style, haze or no haze. And if Trillium and Treehouse aren’t exactly the embodiment of NE IPAs, I don’t know what are. There are dozens of breweries in New England (where I happen to live), all pumping out beers called NE IPAs. NE IPAs are almost invariably similar to Trillium and Treehouse. Come to New England and you’ll see. A lot of them aren’t very good and many of them are painfully similar to one another. But they are all close, with varying degrees of success, to Treehouse, Trillium, and Bissell when it comes to look, aroma, mouthfeel, flavor and bitterness.

But anyway, you paid $8.99 for a bottle of MBC beer. That’s criminal.

 

I'd agree, I think NE IPA gets thrown around a lot. There's more of an "East Coast" style IPA that has modern hops and low bitterness. They were precursors to the NE IPA, beers like Heady or Dinner. That's where I'd put Another One, a modern East Coast IPA but not a NE IPA.

I do find some of MBC's beers can have an odd taste when they show up in distribution. I could see saying they have an earthly quality to them but I'm perplexed by the manure description. Certainly there are lots of descriptions that are used that are a bit non appealing (like horse blanket) but manure seems a bit too extreme for me. That might be what it tastes like to Dansac and that's his prerogative but I don't think I've ever heard anyone else use that description. Personally I think something like "barn stall" might get your point across without making it sound like you are saying it tastes like "shit". I don't think you explicitly want to say it was shit but that it had an earthy barn stall like taste to it. Maybe I'm misinterpreting.

 

I don't think 'manure' is a descriptor I have heard others use either. But as you say, that's not to say one's vocabulary or experience has to be limited by the vocabulary others use. I sometimes hear people describe flavors and aromas in beer I myself never get.

I know the NE moniker has come to stand for hazy, unfiltered, heavily dry hopped, lean malt bill, low bitterness beers in the style of Trillium, Tree House, etc. All I am saying is the regional style is not limited to that. MBC often has very malt lean, very floral and pungent IPAs, though they are not hazy and are a bit drier and more bitter than some of the ones that have become canonical. The style is broader than what has become the standard. The reason is partly because I think there is more to the style than appearance: a lot of beers that get branded as NE style have the haze, but not the flavor profile I associate with NE IPAs. I think there is closer proximity between HF and Heady or MBC than between Hazy Little Thing or some trash like Decadent and HF. A lot of it has to do with the hop profile and what I described as peculiar to the region. But I understand my usage is idiosyncratic.

Unfortunately, I think "NE style" has become reduced to "low bitterness hazy ipa", which is not really what made the style stick out as far as I'm concerned. When I first was exposed to HF, MBC, Trillium and Tree House, it wasn't the haze that stuck out primarily (who honestly cares what it looks like, in the end), but the pungency of the hop aroma coming across in a way uncharacteristic of WC IPAs or old school EC IPAs (which tend to be quite malty), without any malty sweetness, low bitterness, but also with a lean, farmhouse profile. HF in particular had a very rustic hop presentation, almost like smelling a fresh cone of hops, and very earthy aromatics. I have gotten a similar profile from some MBC, and got a whiff of that from AO.

I live in LA, so the price was to be expected. I would not buy it again, however.

 

Well, to be fair, it's arguably my favorite style of beer alongside wild saisons and lambics, so I didn't mean it in a derogatory way. I don't know what a barn stall or horse blanket smells like, though people use those terms. It's probably something similar. I know what soil and manure smell like, though, and it certainly reminds me of it (dad's a botanist in Virginia, and I grew up in Peru, where I had a house in Cuzco).

 

I will be driving back through Freeport on Monday and I'm thinking of stopping in to MBC to see what the new place looks like, try some pizza and buy a few over-priced bottles. Is Dinner constantly available these days? It's been up on the website as available for a while now.

 

According to the staff it is supposed to be there at all times. The place is beautiful.

 

Pizza is good, place is really nice. Definitely worth a stop...