Maine Beer’s steady growth is either confounding or obvious, depending on your lens. The brewery is on pace to brew 43,000 barrels of beer this year, up from about 25,000 in 2019 and 30,000 in 2021. Its leaders are working on a plan to hit 75,000.
So, let’s start with the head-scratching angle: This is a regional brewery, selling beer in 32 states and Washington, D.C., when regional breweries together grew production just 1 percent last year. (The Brewers Association’s journal, The New Brewer, last year described regional breweries as “pumping their legs as fast as they can, just to essentially stay in the same place.”) Despite that footprint:
- Maine Beer hasn’t released a new beer into distribution in three years; the most recent was Little Whaleboat IPA in 2021.
- It packages its beer entirely in kegs or in 16.9-ounce bottles affixed with simple, white labels.
- Whether on draft or bottled, those beers are routinely some of the most expensive anywhere.
- Maine Beer has only one tasting room and three employees on its sales team.
Now, here’s the same brewery viewed through a different lens:
- Maine Beer is synonymous with consistency and quality, offering retailers and drinkers a best-in-class portfolio of IPAs, the most popular craft-beer style in the country.
- It’s built a reputation for environmental stewardship, treating employees fairly, and charitable giving. By the end of this year, its executives say, the brewery will have donated $3.5 million to nonprofits since its founding in 2009.
- Maine Beer’s retail partners become evangelists for the brewery, as do drinkers who’ve been turned on to its beers. Many view it as living up to its motto—“Do what’s right”—earning respect in the industry and appreciation from rank-and-file craft drinkers.
“Make good beer, make it consistently, be nice people—they’re all obvious things,” says Josh Justice, the Houston-based marketing director for the Flying Saucer chain of bars, which regularly sells out of Maine Beer’s products. “I don’t think anyone’s ever tried Lunch and wasn’t completely enthused and in love with the beer. … Maine built a cult following, but without all the asshole trappings that go along with cult-following beers.”
So, where’s the secret sauce? By now, you’ve figured it out: There isn’t any—not beyond the alchemy of impeccable IPA and giving a damn.
If It Ain’t Broke
Call it the SKUmaggedon, call it the return of the flagships—whatever you call it, with wholesalers, retailers, and drinkers overwhelmed by options, there’s been a quiet call for breweries to reinvest in their core portfolios. The catch, of course, is that those core brands must sell.
Maine Beer has been blessed in that regard—drinkers keep going back to Lunch, Peeper, Little Whaleboat, and Wolfe’s Neck, plus special releases such as MO and Dinner. Meanwhile, wholesalers and retailers love the consistency and focus at a time when some breweries seem to be throwing spaghetti at the wall.
That tight portfolio works because the character and quality are there, and that creates a reinforcing loop. CEO Steve Mills enjoys pointing out that while the brewery has only three sales staff, it has twice that many employees in the lab. They’re constantly working on improving the shelf life of standbys such as Lunch and Peeper, even while finding ways to include more local malt—such as that from Blue Ox Malthouse, about 14 miles north of the brewery—while maintaining sensory consistency.
“Look, let’s face it: Our beer’s not cheap,” Mills says. “We ask for a premium, and we understand that in order for us to really fulfill that brand experience, the quality and consistency have to be there every time. Our team takes that very seriously. We call it ‘the Promise.’”
Maine’s beers are routinely some of the most expensive on a menu, even when they’re in rarefied company. At the venerated Hopleaf bar in Chicago, Little Whaleboat, at 6.5 percent ABV, costs $12 per pint—that’s $4 more than a comparable glass of 3 Floyds Zombie Dust and $5 more than Bell’s Oberon. At the Midlands beer and sports bar in Washington, D.C., Lunch costs $10 a pint—a buck or two more than the other IPAs on draft and twice as much as a Miller Lite. At various Flying Saucer bars, Lunch sells for $2 more per pint than other IPAs.
Yet drinkers don’t seem to mind. Nor do retailers.
“People talk about Maine being expensive, but the fact that they sell everything in half-barrels—they’re not that much higher than the hype breweries that send hazies in slims,” says the Flying Saucer’s Justice. While some customers expressed a bit of sticker shock when the bar first tapped Lunch around 2017, Justice says all doubts were erased once they tried the beer.
Typically, he says, two kegs of Lunch last about a week. “If I ever saw somebody not order two Lunches, I’d start to say maybe Maine needs to make something else. … But I have yet to see Lunch slow down or those kegs sit very long.”
Justice calls those beers “comfort food” for beer drinkers, up there with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Toppling Goliath Pseudo Sue as those to which customers keep returning. It also helps that Flying Saucer bartenders love the brewery’s beers and its charitable ethos; it makes Maine Beer one that bartenders recommend to drinkers over and over again.
“There is this desire for consistency from a brewery I can trust,” Justice says. “A 10-day-old keg of Lunch lands, and I don’t need anything new from them.”
In D.C., the Midlands has consistently poured Maine Beer since the bar opened eight years ago. Owner Trent Allen says the brewery is among his favorites in the whole country, calling it “one of the more recognizable names in quality craft beer.”
Photo: Tucker Troast/Maine Beer
Steady Growth Is on Tap
Hopheads across the country are familiar with those distinctive bottles and minimalist labels, but draft is big for Maine Beer—about 80 percent of its production goes into kegs, satisfying that steadily built demand.
Colleen Croteau, Maine Beer’s chief operating officer, says that this slow growth in on-premise accounts—both in their number and in how quickly they sell the beers—has fueled the brewery’s upward sales trajectory.
Distributor shifts also have been critical: Wholesaler consolidations have landed the brewery within the books of larger or networked distributors with greater geographic coverage, particularly in the Northeast. In New Jersey, for example, Maine Beer’s network increased from one wholesaler to five; in Maryland, from one partner to six. Post-COVID, Croteau says, bars are looking for less rotation and more consistency—another boon for Maine Beer.
“When a bar or restaurant is able to find a beer like Lunch that customers recognize and want, and they can sell a volume of it at a good price, it’s profitable for them and a good experience for the customer,” Croteau says. “They’re more likely to put that on and keep it on as a permanent line. The rate of sale increases; the distributor is dropping off two half-barrels a week instead of one. And multiply that by how many accounts we have in 32 states, and the growth in draft has been pretty good for us.”
Photos: Tucker Troast
Against All Odds?
Unimpeachably delicious IPAs are a strong selling point. However, other aspects of Maine’s offerings are less on-trend.
“Maine came in with several strikes against it,” says Michael Roper, owner of the Hopleaf.
Those strikes include:
- price;
- hit-or-miss keg availability that makes it almost impossible to hold down a permanent Maine handle;
- labels that are either boring or so plain that they’re eye-catching, depending on your view;
- and, of course, “stubborn loyalty” to glass bottles, which Roper says neither drinkers nor retailers seem to love.
Distributors ask Maine Beer for new packaging all the time. “It’s always cans,” Croteau says. She lists the reasons Maine sticks with bottles—they’re a little ceremonious and encourage sharing, for one. At the core, though, is a bit of that stubbornness: “We really don’t want to be like everybody else.”
If a brewery sticks to its guns long enough, and its beers are great enough, maybe those unorthodox choices become a point of distinction rather than a liability.
“Other breweries have all kinds of gimmicks to draw attention to their brand. Partnerships with heavy metal bands or movie franchises like Game of Thrones will never be part of the marketing scheme for Maine,” Roper says. “You could almost say that they are diabolically brilliant in their counterintuitive marketing strategy.”
Photos: left: Drew Buerhaus; Jerry Monkman
A Clear View Ahead
As competitive as the craft segment has become, it may sound naive to say that a company’s values move the sales needle across a 32-state territory. Yet Maine Beer’s business partners consistently mention its ethos as a selling point—both for them and for drinkers.
“We were impressed with their environmental sustainability, the way that they treat their employees, and a vibe that completely lacks the aura of greed,” Roper says of his December 2022 visit to the brewery. “They really seem to live up to their company mantra, ‘Do what’s right.’ Their taproom seamlessly blends into the Maine woods. They are of a place, but their values and aesthetic travel well.”
Those values are integral to Maine Beer’s reputation, and they likely help it sell more beer in the market. But they’re not always easy to uphold.
Several years ago, before the brewery’s first major expansion, the cofounders decided to install a solar array rather than make structural changes to increase production. It was the right thing to do, Croteau says, but the brewery’s growth was flat during a year it could have grown.
She says decisions like that would be more difficult if the brewery hadn’t been built on a set of guiding principles from Day One. Cofounders Dave and Dan Kleban have remarked that they’d rather close the brewery than compromise those ideals.
“It’s decisions like that, that Dave and Dan have made through the business, that have inspired us to think about priorities,” Mills says. “There are lots of things we want to spend money on, and you can’t do them all.”
Walking the walk on sustainability, environmental stewardship, and employee satisfaction is an initially bumpy road, Mills says. Investments such as solar, CO2 recapture, or 100 percent employer-paid health insurance are a long game, and the return isn’t obvious right away.
Today, however, Maine Beer is reaping some of what it’s sowed over its first 15 years, while its full potential appears to be years away. People will pay for products that align with their values, and Maine is inspired by the long path paved by like-minded, successful companies such as Patagonia.
“It’s pretty easy to go to bed at night and wake up energized to go to work because of our purpose,” Mills says. “Your decisions become easier when your values are clear, and when you’re clear with your values.”