Maine Beer Unveils 49 Foot Whale Skeleton On Taproom Ceiling

Here we have some exciting and unique news coming out of Maine Beer Co in Portland, Maine:

On Thanksgiving 2023, a young female fin whale named Finny came ashore in Steuben. She was emaciated and barely half the size of a full-grown adult at just 49.6 feet long. After her death, College of the Atlantic Allied Whale staff, students, and volunteers recovered her skeleton many months later with support from Maine Beer Company.
In the earliest days of MBC, our first nonprofit donation of only $100 began a partnership that has grown over time and continues to this day in support of Allied Whale’s work, leading the way in marine mammal field research.

Finny was carefully cleaned and reassembled by students at College of the Atlantic under the guidance of Dan DenDanto of Whales and Nails, a research associate with Allied Whale and COA’91. On September 16th, Finny’s skeleton will be suspended above the Maine Beer Company tasting room, giving her a second life to spark curiosity and connection to these magnificent animals.

And speaking of fin whales, Lunch, a fin whale first spotted along the Maine coast in 1982, has what looks like a bite taken out of her dorsal fin. In 2009, Lunch captured the imagination of David, our co-founder. Following an unplanned visit to a whale museum on a rainy day, he named our signature IPA after her. While not Lunch, this fin whale skeleton serves as a reminder of our lasting partnership in support of the wild and majestic marine mammals of Maine.

We invite you to join us in officially welcoming Finny to our family with a special Evening Benefit for Allied Whale on Wednesday, October 1st. We will unveil the fin whale skeleton in our tasting room, and have remarks from:
• Daniel Kleban, Co-founder of Maine Beer Company
• Sean Todd, Director, COA Allied Whale
• Dr. Sylvia Torti, President of College of the Atlantic
• Rep. Chellie Pingree, U.S. Representative, COA Class of 1979

Let’s Get Together for Lunch! We hope to see you there.
All proceeds directly support the critical work of Allied Whale.
Event tickets and information can be found here: coa.edu/giving/advancement-events/allied-whale-benefit/

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.