It was just last year that the Brut IPA hit the scene, thanks to Kim Sturdavant, Brewmaster at Social Kitchen & Brewery in San Francisco. His goal was to make the driest, lightest IPA possible, hence the name “brut” like a dry champagne. The secret is to add amyloglucosidase (a common enzyme) to help the yeast to consume more of the sugars during fermentation, usually used in a high-gravity …Read More
Sour beers are unpredictable. They can take a long time to mature too, most sours taking more than a year before they can even be considered for blending or serving. Our brewers are proud to present their latest labors of love, one a barrel-aged Brett beer and the other a kettle sour. Both are fruity and delicious. Racking My Brain took about 18 months to complete. Brewers took Saddleback …Read More
What’s both cloudy and light? The answer, friends, is Hefeweizen and we just brewed 40 barrels of it! Hefeweizen is a German beer (pronounced HAY-fuh-vites-in if you want to get technical). “Hefe” means yeast, which gives the beer its cloudy appearance, and “weizen” refers to wheat. Typically, Hefeweizen has a low-hop character and with phenolic (clove) and fruity (banana) aromas and flavors. This isn’t the first time we’ve …Read More
Without the Sebago Brewing Company Packaging Crew, we wouldn’t have Back in the Day – and you wouldn’t have delicious Sebago beer! Packaging Manager Kara Obergfell says that packaging is the last line of defense in the process of beer making: “It’s not a simple process. You need to be alert and aware of so many different variables. The care of this beer happens from beginning to end.” Rachel …Read More
Originally brewed to celebrate our 20th Anniversary, Back in the Day was first called Pack in the Day, in honor of the packaging team that created it. Rachel Ellis, Alex Upton, and Erik White came up with the recipe for the hazy New England-style DIPA that’s all the rage – but with special Sebago touches. BITD features one of the team’s favorite hops (Mosaic) and Golden Promise malt (Erik’s …Read More
What’s fresher than fresh? A can of beer directly off the canning line! That’s why we’ve been loving Fresh Fill Fridays at the brewery. In the fall of 2018, we had our first Fresh Fill Friday to introduce the world to NED IPA in a can…and to invite the world into our brewery. The idea came from the great minds in our brewing and packaging crew who dared ask …Read More
If you’ve been a fan of Slick Nick for the past 20 years, then you may know that the “long winter ale” wasn’t named after a jolly, fat man dressed in red. Nope, Slick Nick is named after the song by Fishbone, a ska-funk band beloved by our VP and co-founder Kai Adams. Slick Nick has been popular since we first started brewing it. You know what? Let’s let …Read More
As we creep up on 2019, we wanted to take a moment to look back on this amazing year. Sebago Brewing Co. kicked off 2018 with some Barleywine kudos: Paste Magazine ranked our 2017 Barleywine as the third best out of 62 other barleywines across the country. In the spring, we opened our Destination Brewery in Gorham. First the Tasting Room in February, followed by our beautiful new brewery. We …Read More
It’s been a killer Fall for Sebago small batch beers. (And for fresher than fresh local hop beers, including our first-ever estate brew Hop Yard Porter.) Our brewers Kevin Depot and Molly Wolkin experimented with one of the most recent twists on the American IPA, the Brut IPA. Typically, Brut IPAs are bone dry, aromatically hoppy, and lack the traditional bitter bite found in many IPAs. This style is …Read More
Our brewmaster Tom Abercrombie calls HopYard Porter a nod to harvest, autumn, and all things Maine. This year’s version features our first estate-grown barley harvested from the site of our new Brewery. When the Shaw Brothers leased six acres of land in Gorham to us back in March, conserving farmland was what they had in mind. Of course what we had in mind was how soon we could grow …Read More
Ready for NED? We’re serving it up to you fresh from the canning line. On Friday, November 2nd, we’re (re)releasing NED, a hoppy IPA with a spicy, piney aroma and bold rye flavors. If it feels like deja vu, it’s because we brewed “Ned Ryerson” back in 2016 in honor of Portland Beer Week (and Bill Murray). It’s back by popular demand, though the name and recipe have …Read More
How do brewers raise money? They get together and make beer! Our own Jon Clegg is the president of the District New England group of the Master Brewers Association of the Americas. MBAA was formed in 1887 to promote and improve “the professional interest of brew and malt house production and technical personnel.” Today Master Brewers has more than 4,000 members in 25 different districts from more than 50 …Read More
For this year’s Local Harvest brew, we really changed things up. Instead of doing one big Local Harvest batch like we’ve done in the past, we took advantage of our pilot brewhouses (and proximity to a local farm) and created two very different small batch fresh hop beers. For both beers we used fresh hops, of course – but when we say fresh, we mean FRESH. The hops came …Read More
Autumn. In some corners this means pumpkin beer, but around here we’re all about Bonfire. What started out as a pilot brew by Sebago brewer Rusty Packer, this dark ale has become a favorite because of its earthy undertones (think pine and sage) balanced with toasty, sweet malt flavors. This year’s recipe features Columbus, Chinook and Simcoe hops – added late in the process to maximize those generous hoppy …Read More
After a brief hiatus, we threw our favorite Fall party, Oktoberfest! More than 300 people joined us on September 22 for our first Oktoberfest at the Destination Brewery. We were cooking up bratwurst with sauerkraut and onions, serving up wood-fired pretzels and German potato salad, not to mention yummy pickles made by our own talented brewers. And of course we were pouring: Oktoberfest (our tribute to the classic Marzen …Read More
