Maine Beer Co-Founder Dan Kleban Running For U.S. Senate

Today, I have some interesting political news coming out of the state of Maine. Maine Beer co-founder Dan Kleban has announced that he will be running against Susan Collins to become the next U.S. senator from the state of Maine.
According to NBC News,

Kleban, a Democrat who is a co-founder of Maine Beer Co., says Mainers have lost confidence in Republican Sen.Susan Collins ahead of her re-election race next year, so he’s jumping into the race to defeat her.
“The cost of living up here is too damn high. People are being squeezed, and Susan Collins isn’t doing enough to help families out up here,” Kleban said in an interview Tuesday ahead of his campaign launch Wednesday. Kleban said Collins “went Washington, and she stopped looking out for Mainers.”

“People up here are struggling,” Kleban added later. “We’re a bunch of hard workers up here. We don’t ask for a lot. We don’t ask for handouts. All we ask is we get a fair shake.”

“What I’m going to do is offer voters a vision of the future that’s inspirational. How are we going to make their lives better and not get bogged down in social issues?” he said, saying he plans to focus on improving access to affordable housing and quality health care.

UPDATE 16 Oct 2025:

Dan Kleban has ended his bid for a Senate seat, and he has backed Janet Mills.

zzubreebym

About Maine Beer Co:

In 2008, my brother, Daniel, went down to Boston for law school. During his first summer he got an internship at a firm back in Maine, so he lived with us for a few months. A partner at the firm gave the interns a lesson in brewing as something fun to do. I guess my brother liked what he saw.

After that summer, Daniel went back to school and the snow fell again and again over the next few years. Luck would have it that he got a job in Portland after graduating. On the weekends we would drink beer. Just something we always enjoyed.

We eventually realized that we should brew beer on the weekends and drink at the same time. We made some really awful beer. Some ok beer. It didn’t really matter. We had fun.

We got a bit more serious and drove three hours each way to pick up a homebrew set-up for $300 that we found on Craigslist. We brewed on my front porch in the winter and we brewed in his hot garage in the summer. He loved brewing. I loved helping.
It finally hit me. My brother really loved brewing. He had a job and school debt but I figured I would ask anyway: Do you want to be a lawyer or a brewer for the rest of your life? He said: brewer.


In 2009, we opened shop on Industrial Way in Portland. We had a one barrel brew house. The term nano brewery was not even around yet, as far as I know. A brewery had not been started in Maine for a long time.
Our plan was to do one beer really well to start. Make only beer that we want to drink, period. No market research. Do it, do it well. If they drink it, great. If they don’t, we go back to our day jobs.

We worked on a single recipe. Over and over and over and over. Spring Peeper Ale (now Peeper) was born.
I hit the streets armed with a small, cheap cooler filled with our beer.
Door to door I went. Sometimes my young daughter, Zoe, would come along.


In December 2010, after a year and a half of the nano thing, we bought a 15bbl brew house and a 30bbl fermentor.
And then we added another 30bbl fermenter. And another and another. We were then out of space and out of our minds in Portland.

As we’ve grown.
I always say that we are not going to get any bigger, but I’ve learned that to make better beer, we need better people and better equipment, and we need to make more beer to pay for those things.


Our new brewery opened in Freeport in April 2013. We had a bigger space for brewing. And more fermentors.
And a warehouse.
And a small tasting room.
And a small office.
But eventually, we were out of space yet again.

In 2018, we completed construction on an even bigger production facility and, by Spring of 2019, transformed the old production space into a larger tasting room.
More room for beer.
More room for guests.

And a patio.
And a pizza oven.

Do what’s right.
We always knew that we wanted to be a certain kind of company. We wanted to do things right no matter what. We told ourselves that if we couldn’t do things right then we wouldn’t do them at all.

From day one, we’ve been members of 1% for the Planet which was born out of the Do what’s right motto. We wanted to make giving back a part of our business and we decided what was most important to us was the environment. It’s a commitment we made even when we weren’t generating any profit, we were still donating 1% of our sales.

The work we do with our nonprofit partners, annual giving, employee-directed giving, events, and volunteer efforts continue to have a meaningful impact on both our community and the planet.

To be honest, we really didn’t know if it would work, but because of everyone who bought our beer and all the great people who work with us, we made it happen. We’re always trying to be better at making quality beer, treating our employees well, and taking care of our Earth and the creatures that live on it.