Sebago Brewing CO.’s 25th anniversary bash at its brewery and restaurant in Gorham. Photo by Ben Lisle

The year is 1998. Bill Clinton is impeached by the House of Representatives. Viagra is approved by the FDA. Google is founded. “Titanic” wins 11 Academy Awards, and “The Big Lebowski” debuts. The Chicago Bulls win their sixth NBA title in eight years, as Michael Jordan plays his final game for the team, the same year that Celtics star Jayson Tatum is born. The historic Ice Storm slams Maine. And a new brewpub, Sebago Brewing Co., opens in the Maine Mall parking lot, in a building previously occupied by a Chinese restaurant called Hu Ke Lau.

Sebago is celebrating its 25th anniversary this summer, joining about a dozen other Maine breweries that remain open since its debut. A celebration last weekend marked the occasion, the sun unexpectedly edging the clouds off the forecast, as Sebago’s three co-founders – Kai Adams, Tim Haines and Brad Monarch – smilingly made the rounds.

The three met while working at chain restaurant Chili’s, near the mall. Adams had been the brewmaster at Sea Dog Brewing Co. in Camden and had designs on opening his own brewpub, so he took the job at Chili’s to learn more about that side of the business. Haines and Monarch, who both had extensive restaurant experience, were managers there when Adams arrived in 1996. Before long, they were hatching plans for a brewpub of their own (perhaps with Chili’s (in)famous “Baby Back Ribs” jingle, released in 1997, as a soundtrack). Those plans were realized when the trio mustered roughly $300,000 from their own pockets, other investors and a Small Business Administration loan.

“We always went in with the mindset that Sebago was going to be a restaurant with fresh craft beer rather than a brewery with food,” Haines recalled. “The three of us had a shared passion for hospitality. I set up the front of the house and bar; Brad headed up the back of the house and ran the kitchen; Kai was in charge of the brewery – we all had our own areas from the beginning.”

Sebago co-founder Kai Adams at its original brewery in 1998. Photo courtesy of Sebago Brewing Co.

In March 1998, Adams and Monarch wrote Sebago’s first check for their brewhouse. That 10-barrel system had originally been built in New Jersey for a brewpub in Singapore, where it was only used three times before the business went under. A restaurateur in Kona took it off the brewpub’s hands, but never installed it. Sebago scooped it up and put it on a 17-day trip, via shipping container and train, to South Portland.

Once it arrived, that system would draw its water from the brewery’s namesake – Sebago Lake. It is a body of water that has been underpinning Maine beer since the swashbuckling McGlinchy brothers were illegally (but quite publicly) brewing and advertising their beer as “SEBAGO WATER ALE” in 1871, flaunting the contemporaneous (and prohibitionary) Maine Law.

https://www.newspapers.com/article/portland-press-herald/127259174/

Article from Jan 10, 1871 Portland Press Herald (Portland, Maine)

Sebago Brewing Co. would channel those waters into four original offerings: Northern Light Ale (now known as Saddleback Ale), Lake Trout Stout, Boathouse Brown Ale, and the now-classic Frye’s Leap IPA, a balanced IPA featuring Cascade, Columbus and Centennial hops, providing those classic American pine and grapefruit pale ale notes.

Adams points to a couple key elements of the craft beer milieu that helped them get off the ground.

“Before we owned Sebago, we’d call other breweries up and say, ‘Hey, I’m having this problem, what are you doing?’ What that became is a lot of camaraderie in the mechanical and practical ways to fix things. There weren’t a lot of those kinds of resources in the beginning. It was great to reach out to other brewers and get support, and as Sebago Brewing grew, we shared information with other breweries. That’s why it’s the way it is today in Maine.”

Another key resource was the Maine Brewers’ Guild, which had been around for roughly a half-decade when Sebago opened. According to Adams, the guild was “instrumental in bringing a lot of the industry tools and knowledge to the brewers” – things like access to equipment, ingredients, and technical support.

Bottles from the Sebago Brewing Co.’s early days. Photo courtesy of Sebago Brewing Co.

Sebago soon opened new brewpubs in the Old Port (in 2000) and Gorham (2001), in an erstwhile train station originally built in 1853. The latter remains, having been remodeled in 2022 (while the Old Port brewpub was relocated down the street in 2011, then closed in 2022). They opened a production brewery in Gorham in 2005. The original South Portland location was replaced by the Scarborough brewpub, just a bit south, in 2009. The Kennebunk brewpub opened in 2010. In 2018, they built the current brewery (and restaurant), selling the old production brewery to Lone Pine Brewing. And in 2022, they installed a new sophisticated canning line manufactured in Italy which enabled them to package up to 200 cans per minute (compared to 70 on the previous system); perhaps more importantly, it filled the cans in a sealed environment securing more shelf stability (up from about 90 days to four months, according to Adams).

While drinkers might not think much about packaging technology, such improvements are vital to maintaining the value of craft beer.

“In recent years especially, people go for quality instead of quantity,” Haines says, explaining the popularity of places like Sebago. “Craft beers are fresh and local. And all of these small brewers have a good vibe – when you can get a pint in a Maine tasting room, it’s the freshest beer you can get.”

From left, Sebago Brewing co-founders Tim Haines, Kai Adams and Brad Monarch inside the then-new Gorham tasting room and restaurant in 2018. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

When asked about which of their own beers they most appreciate, the three partners’ answers express the brewery’s contemporary range. Adams clearly gravitates toward IPAs, citing Frye’s Leap, Hop Swap (which rotates its hops each iteration), and No Comply, a West-Coast-style IPA. (At the time of writing, the first two were available in the brewery taproom.)

Monarch “loves how IPA has proliferated and evolved over the years,” but he is particularly “intrigued” by the brewery’s barrel-aged beers. The brewery taproom had three available at their anniversary party: Racking My Brain, a barrel-fruited sour fermented on brett in wine barrels, with fresh raspberries added later; Bog So Hard, a barrel-aged cranberry saison aged in pinot noir and gin barrels; and the 2022 Barleywine, aged 10 months in bourbon barrels from Widow Jane and Woodford Reserve. (Of note, the brewery was still selling four-packs of their “vertical release” of barleywines, with one can each from the 2019 to 2022 versions. Just 250 of these went up for sale; one fewer was available after my visit.)

Haines’s favorite is a deep cut from the brewery’s back catalog – and a style seldomly seen in modern times. Milestone was a steinbier made in 2010. As he describes it, “We took a barrel and heated up granite stones and dropped them in the wort. The wort caramelized over the stones and created this toasty flavor that was very complex.” The brewers then used Citra hops (the first time Sebago used the now ubiquitous hop variety), adding stone fruit notes. Traditional with a spark of innovation – these are the sorts of adaptations that have made craft beer so vital in Maine.

This union of the artisanal and the experimental perhaps explains Sebago’s persistence for a quarter-century.

“There are a lot of headwinds for craft beer,” Adams notes. And we’ve seen younger breweries respond by opening multiple locations and adopting the brewpub model, combining quality food with fresh and local beer. In a sense, what is old has become new again, and breweries like Sebago have charted that path (though nothing is certain).

“I think most importantly breweries that are innovating and doing things a little bit differently every day will be more sustainable,” Adams says, “as opposed to expecting the same results from doing the same thing we’ve done in the past.”

That said, history demonstrates that there is always an appetite for social spaces like brewpubs. “Our entire business is about getting people together to connect and socialize,” Monarch said. “That’s why we started Sebago Brewing Company in the first place.”