Thinking Outside the Box, the Bottle and the Brewery
Located on Portland’s waterfront, Liquid Riot Bottling Company isn’t just a brewery. It isn’t just a distillery, either, or a restaurant or a bar. It is all those things and more.
“We do everything,” said owner Eric Michaud, “we can’t have one part without the others here. There’s a synergy to it.” Nationwide, there are still only a dozen or so brewery/distillery combinations out there. It’s difficult to manage two alcoholic-beverage-producing operations in concert, let alone with the addition of a full-service restaurant and bar, but after five years, Liquid Riot seems to have it handled. Michaud, who also founded Novare Res Bier Café, a renowned craft-beer bar in the Old Port, works with his small, close-knit team to accomplish something that others have not even dared to attempt.
The brewing and distilling processes at Liquid Riot are done in full view of the public, behind floor-to-ceiling windows. There’s even a small stool that patrons can climb to look down into one of the fermentation tanks.
As I saw on a recent tour, a lot of activity also takes place behind the scenes. Between the back of the kitchen and the distillation room, a new canning line rests along the wall. Michaud said this equipment — which replaces a labor-intensive, two-head filling station — will allow them to put more beer into cans to be sold outside the brewery. A key feature of the canning line is its wheels — it can be rolled from the hallway into the brewing room and back again. “It’s a little bit like Tetris,” admits Michaud, but it gets the job done.
There are about 16 Liquid Riot beers on tap at the bar at any given time, in a wide variety of styles: hoppy IPAs; tart and sour beers; deep, rich stouts; and Belgian-style brews. One of my recent favorites is their Easy Like Sunday Morning, a thick, viscous oatmeal stout made with coffee from local roaster Speckled Ax and Maine maple syrup. While I’m not usually a fan of super-sweet stouts, this one’s coffee notes temper the sweetness while retaining a discernable maple note on top.
The increased canning capacity means larger quantities of beer, like their NSFW (“not suitable for work”) IPA, can make it into more drinkers’ hands. The NSFW is a triple IPA that’s been dry-hopped four times and has an ABV of 10%. It reminds me of the kind of extreme IPAs that peaked in popularity around 2010-2012: fun, but dangerously drinkable.
Hiding among the stronger-flavored IPAs, sours and stouts is an unusual entry, the Special Ale. This beer has been one of Michaud’s personal favorites (he jokes that it’s the only beer he regularly makes the brewing staff brew especially for him). The copper-colored ale may not turn a lot of heads, but it’s a brilliant reprieve for the palate and seems to suit any situation. Described as a “UK-style winter warmer,” the Special Ale’s caramel notes, full body and slight hint of bitterness are perfectly balanced. It manages to satisfy all the senses without overwhelming any single one of them, which makes it a rare treat.
Another recent addition is a custom-made, spontaneous-fermentation vessel known as a coolship. A copper vessel with two pans stacked one atop the other, Liquid Riot’s coolship was built for its tight spaces and currently resides on a deck on the side of the building. To make “wild” beers, brewers take the hot wort and spread it out into the coolship’s metal vessels to cool, exposed to the open air. Local, wild yeasts then settle on the wort and it’s subsequently put in barrels to ferment. Liquid Riot is the fifth Maine brewery to use a coolship (after Allagash, Rising Tide, Oxbow Brewing Company and Bissell Brothers, who’ve installed one in their second location in Milo). This is an unusually high number of coolships for a state with a brewing industry of this size (about 100 breweries), but there’s certainly plenty of free, wild yeast in the air for everyone.
People tend to categorize everything, to put things in familiar boxes. When I’m rattling off lists of where visitors should go for a meal, a beer, a cocktail or a night out in the Old Port, I sometimes forget to include Liquid Riot because of its hybrid nature. That’s a disservice. Its offerings are broad enough to appeal to foodies, craft-beer fans, cocktail aficionados and even teetotalers — they also make a wide variety of carbonated sodas and cola in-house.
So, what is Liquid Riot? Simply put, it’s a place that should be on your list, too.
