Maine Beer Co. At Blind Tiger

Maine Beer Company at Blind Tiger podcast on WFMU

  Non-Flash podcast

Brothers David and Daniel Kleban made the jump from homebrewers to commercial brewers in 2009 in Portland, Maine. The first beer of their Maine Beer Company, Spring Peeper, was inspired by hoppy West Coast craft beers, and it was their only product at the start. This past April they moved into a new 15-barrel brewery in Freeport, Maine, which is quite a leap from their original 1-barrel system. On the smaller system they would brew three batches on Saturday and on Sunday to fill their 7-barrel fermenter. Now they'll be able to fill two 7-barrel fermenters in one brew!

Katherine of Blind Tiger, Dave, B.R. and Bob.

Dave was in town recently for an event at the Blind Tiger, which had a number of this beers on tap and in the bottle. We were able to sample a few "pilot" beers, both 5.2% ABV, that were on draught: Pilot 1, a hoppy American Pale Ale with some citrus notes, and Pilot 2, an American Saison with a hint of bitter orange peel mixing with hop bitterness. We also got a taste of the Mean Old Tom stout and Zoe, a 7% ABV amber ale, all on tap. We shared a medium sized bottle of the King Titus with our pal Josh (who gets the photo credit above), a delicious 7.5% ABV robust porter, which was very smooth, malty and well rounded, with some mildy chocolate notes.

Pilot 2

Check out the podcast to find out why they changed the name of Spring Peeper to simply Peeper, and also to find out what the heck a peeper is!

Pilot 1 and Zoe

King Titus robust porter.

The new brewery, with tasting room.

Slightly more than one barrel.