#farmhouse-ales

#farmhouse-ales

"We've spent the last six years building a farm and homestead from scratch here, which has become home to a restaurant, guesthouse, and brewery, chickens, ducks, two donkeys, and a small flock of dairy sheep."

Maine is known for its fresh seafood, specifically lobster, and has many other foods native to its culinary culture that are unbreakably tied to the state.

Bullhide Brewery, which took roughly six years to come to fruition, opened its doors in December of 2025, just two doors down from Cowtown Cowboy Outfitters.

In 2014, Leon opened his brewery's first location inside a tiny warehouse space in the city's north-east. It was good timing. All over North America, millennials were going crazy for craft beer, and in Alberta, the government had recently changed rules to help microbreweries get their product to market. "There was a huge thirst in Alberta for craft beer," said Leon, who recalls getting emails about new breweries opening nearly every week. "It was a pretty wild time."

The U.S. spirits landscape has evolved far beyond the recognition of simply being the birthplace of bourbon. In recent years, we've seen a transformation in both the quality and individuality that the country's craft distilleries have been able to produce. While previous decades were dominated by the big-name distilleries, far more awards are going to craft distillers who have mastered the art of producing high-quality whiskeys, rums, gins, and more.

Low Key represents a deliberate innovation play for Harpoon based on emerging cultural trends toward moderation over abstention, the company notes. Rather than simply diluting an existing popular recipe, the team applied new techniques to preserve flavor, aroma, and craft quality, just at a lower ABV.

No trip to the brewery is complete without sampling the wares. Even if it's a place you visit regularly, you'll likely want to sample most of what it has to offer at least once. But while a greater variety may seem more enticing, it can also signal a potential red flag. Every kind of beer they have on tap means another tap that needs to be maintained. The more tap lines they have, the more likely it is that maintenance or cleaning gets neglected.

Ninja vs. Unicorn is classified as a double IPA and offers a generous 8% ABV. "A golden haze speaks to the unfiltered, grapefruit-noted, balanced IPA's character with a shockingly low bitterness, considering how much hops go into the brewing," Horan says about what makes the brew so special. More than five pounds of hops are included in each barrel used to brew this crowd pleaser.

Bell's, famous for its Two Hearted IPA and summer-coded Oberon, was founded in 1985 as Kalamazoo Brewing Co. in Michigan. In that first year, it brewed 135 barrels. Today, it brews nearly 500,000 barrels annually. A barrel is roughly 31 gallons, or about two kegs' worth of beer. So the brewery's production went from around 270 kegs in 1986 to around 934,000 kegs today.