Loud Beers From Quiet Spaces — Oxbow Brewing Company in Maine

About midway through our first meeting four years ago, Oxbow Brewing Company’s founder, Tim Adams, stopped me mid-sentence.“You’re telling me that the very first time you went fly-fishing was on the Gunny?” he asked.

At the time, we were sitting in the brewery’s Newcastle, Maine tasting room with a beer called Space Cowboy, a Bière du Pays, or “French farmhouse country ale,” in hand. Adams’ interjection was the product of an incredulity that had been fermenting since I’d asked about the fly fishing rods affixed to his red 2008 Toyota 4Runner earlier in the day. In addition to being a brewer, Adams is a fervent fisherman, and a brand ambassador for the sporting goods company Yeti. As I learned then, he’s also no stranger to “the Gunny” (a colloquialism for the Gunnison River in western Colorado), one of the premier fly fishing destinations in the United States.

For a few minutes, we took a break from talking about his background, his journey from Maine to Tokyo to Colorado and back to the Pine Tree State, to chat about the Black Canyons of the Gunnison National Park, salmon flies, and the allure of floating down a river on a beautiful spring day in search of native trout. “That’s a bucket-list trip, man,” he said, wistfully.

Now, in the present, once again sharing beers with the co-founder and owner of Oxbow, I find myself reflecting on that first exchange. It’s clear from his comportment that Adams feels restless. We’re sitting at a popular Tex-Mex restaurant across from his brewery’s second of three locations—Oxbow Blending & Bottling in Portland, Maine—drinking Mexican Lagers and eating smoked ribs and an heirloom tomato and cucumber salad. He rattles off places he’s traveled in the name of beer—Japan, Italy, Belgium—and tells a story about being detained in Russia for improper paperwork.

Adams is tall, with long, dirty blonde hair that falls to the middle of his chest. He’s also gregarious, a natural storyteller who pantomimes the search for the U.S. Embassies in Russia on his phone, mimicking the accent and threatening nature of the Russian soldiers. In the end, he shakes his head, and finishes the story by casually remarking that he ended up on a plane to Latvia, where he bought a skateboard and skated around the country and hung with “some awesome dudes at Labietis,” a brewery in Riga.

It’s easy to see that Adams’ peripatetic nature is what drives him—and that the lack of travel opportunities afforded over the last 19-odd months has cramped his style. He’s a person who likes to move, who looks for—and is good at finding—a common ground with whomever he is speaking. In his work with Oxbow, he’s built professional relationships with brewers across the world and with local restaurateurs that look more like friendships.

“Tim is a world-traveler,” says Allagash Brewing Company’s brewmaster, Jason Perkins. “He loves to connect with people. He’s created three really great spaces to showcase that.”

In a world still on edge from the pandemic, Adams is more than ready for adventure, and to start making new connections again. That wanderlust is born from formative years spent abroad, when he learned lessons about longevity and experimentation, and that finding a common language—be it fishing or music or beer—can be unifying, wherever you are.

AN AMERICAN IN THE CREW

Adams is originally from Yarmouth, roughly a dozen miles northeast of Portland. He grew up in a “pretty serious ski family.” His father was a ski patroller, and as a youth, he was a ski racer. “Every weekend, we were skiing,” he says. “And then I basically stopped when we moved to Tokyo, and [it] was just city boy life for that whole time.”

“That was a big guiding principle of Oxbow, this hyper-focus on farmhouse Ales and just getting better and better and better, and exploring where you can go within that medium.”

When Adams was 14, his father’s day job at an insurance company relocated to Tokyo, Japan. Adams, his parents, and his two younger sisters moved across the world.

“That was a huge move that had a very big impact on my life,” he says. “I was right in the middle of Tokyo and was able to, I don’t know, just have all kinds of experiences that, looking back, definitely led me to where I am right now. And [those years] have had a lot of influence on Oxbow and the direction that we’ve gone as a company.”

The years between 14-18 inform our future outlook in many ways. We begin to form our own identities and establish a worldview. We witness both the beauty and the cracks in the foundations of our lives on a micro and macro scale. Those years are typically transformative, even without moving 6,000 miles away, without spending them in a place where you don’t know anyone, nevermind the language.

“While I was over there, I was at the right age,” he says. “I was at an age in the city where it was safe enough that I could just go anywhere, anytime. And so I was just on the streets, skateboarding every single day and meeting all these Japanese skate kids and just learning [the] Japanese [language] through them. And then just going out on the town.”

Going out on the town turned into working as a bartender and front-of-house employee in an izakaya. As a foreigner, Adams didn’t have much difficulty purchasing booze in the city, which meant he “was able to kind of familiarize myself with that world at a younger age. It was more of a grown-up drinking experience.” Later, he parlayed that experience into a gig with a party production company that threw, in Adams’ words, “crazy raves.”

Eventually, armed with several years of experience in hospitality—and in drinking—Adams left Tokyo to attend college in Colorado Springs. The main draw was getting back onto the slopes, but in the burgeoning hotbed of the early-aughts craft beer world, there was no place hotter than Colorado.

THE BELGIAN EPIPHANY

Most beer drinkers’ consumption has an ebb and flow. We start out gravitating toward drinkability. As we continue along our journey, many of us dive into the extremes of flavor: think barrel-aged dark beers, or tongue-scraping West Coast IPAs. There are peaks and valleys, trends that crest and recede.

That’s certainly true of Adams’ own journey with beer. His progressive college seemed to find frequent excuses to throw parties and outfit them with kegs of locally made beer, he says, and it wasn’t long before he caught the homebrewing bug. At the time, “It was all, ‘Give me your Double IPAs, give me your Imperial Stouts.’ You know, big bold flavors.”

After graduating, and with an ever-growing interest in brewing, Adams returned to the East Coast. It was while working in Washington, D.C. as a beer sales rep that he started traveling around the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. And that’s when he first fell for Belgian beers. “I’ll never forget my first Fantôme,” he says. “I’ll never forget my first Orval. Those experiences were definitely the ones that were pivotal tasting experiences early on for creating the early Oxbow.”

It was when marrying his experiences in the Colorado beer world with those Old World styles that an idea sparked. “With my background as an American beer drinker in the early 2000s, the typical American craft beer drinker, hophead kind of deal, and then getting exposed to all this Belgian stuff, I thought, ‘Well, maybe we can kind of bring these two together a little bit and, you know, maybe I can merge the two.’”

Thus was born the idea for the brewery’s flagship beer, Farmhouse Pale Ale, or FPA (also a nod to his great-grandfather, the newspaper columnist Franklin Pierce Adams), a Saison-like beer brewed with American hops. To make that beer happen, though, he needed a place to brew it. And that meant settling down somewhere more permanently.

“[Maine] is where I wanted to spend my life,” he tells me. “I’m glad to have lived elsewhere and gotten that inspiration and seen a lot of the world and a lot of incredible beer cities and beer cultures. I wanted to take what I’d seen elsewhere in the world and in the United States and bring it to Maine. To diversify Maine’s beer scene and add something new.”

‘BE OUT HERE IN THE BEAUTIFUL MAINE WOODS’

Miles of spidering rivers cover coastal Maine, all ultimately destined for the sea. Not far from the original Oxbow brewery is the Dyer River, its most distinct feature, a series of oxbows, or U-shaped curves that flow into the larger Sheepscot River. As we learn in sixth-grade geometry, the fastest way from one point to another is a straight line. But nature, as it always has, will dictate the true path to any given destination.

Newcastle, Maine is the first home of Oxbow Brewing Company, and is located just down the street from a local landmark called, I kid you not, Cowshit Corner. “It’s not an easy place to get to,” laughed the now-former Oxbow brewer Mike Fava, on the day I visited Newcastle. To this day, 100% of Oxbow’s beers are produced in this small farmhouse brewery, situated on 18 acres of Maine backwoods.

“Beer and place can be equal parts of the enjoyment of an experience,” Adams says. “You have the beer and you can talk about the beer and we’re talking and connecting on a personal level and sharing the experience of drinking this beer. That, to me, is a really neat way to interact with someone. [Customers] are getting an experience. Drinking beer is the center of that experience, but that’s just one part of it. They can [also] wander around the farm operations or sit by the pond or under the tree or at the picnic tables. Be out here in the beautiful Maine woods.”

Oxbow’s tagline is “loud beers from a quiet place.” That’s only really half true. This is a quiet place, sure, but I’d also suggest that these beers are quiet, too. Not in a meek or insignificant or inferior way, though. Instead, Oxbow’s beers are nuanced and subtle, full of soft features, each ingredient showcased delicately.

There’s an obvious metaphor in the name of the brewery: These beers aren’t designed for quick turnaround. Like the initial trickle at the source of a river, they will eventually get to where they need to be.

“I had my beers that I wanted to brew, but when I first brewed them using this water coming from the well that’s right underneath this brewery that’s completely untreated and beautiful, those beers changed. All of a sudden, everything completely clicked.”

When he founded Oxbow in 2011, Adams fashioned the company as “an American farmhouse brewery.” His inspiration for his beers, and his vision for the company, came from setting foot onto the Newcastle property, which belonged to his former business partner (that partner, Geoff Masland, is no longer involved with the company).

“[The Newcastle site] was the inspiration,” Adams says. “That place dictated how we laid things out. I had my beers that I wanted to brew, but when I first brewed them using this water coming from the well that’s right underneath this brewery that’s completely untreated and beautiful, those beers changed. All of a sudden, everything completely clicked.”

Picture a tree. On that tree, dozens of branches extend outward. They’re all unique, reaching toward different horizons; there are variabilities in length and width. They’re all part of the same tree, but serve a different form and function.

That tree represents the broad beer-making category of farmhouse Ale. The limbs become the subspecies: Saison, Kvass, mixed-fermentation Ales, spontaneous Ales, and so on. Oxbow specializes in crafting these beers. Adams calls this “hyperspecialization,” and thinks that his Japanese influence may have played a role there.

“You know, it’s like a ramen chef will spend his whole life trying to perfect that bowl around it,” he says, “and there’s honor in that. It’s like one thing again and again. So that was a big guiding principle of Oxbow, this hyper-focus on farmhouse Ales and just getting better and better and better, and exploring where you can go within that medium.”

HIERARCHIES OF RESPECT AND TRADITION

But Adams wasn’t alone in those woods. Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery’s founder, has been coming to Maine on family vacations for years—and even named his brewery after the island they stay on, just a little downriver from Oxbow’s Newcastle brewery.

Calagione says that he enjoys drinking locally when he’s traveling, and came across Oxbow about five or six years ago. “I loved the beer,” he says, while shouting out Oxbow staples like Luppolo (an Italian Pilsner), Crossfade (a hop-forward Saison aged with Brettanomyces), and Farmhouse Pale Ale. “Now most trips we take [to Maine] we hit up Oxbow.”

Initially, Calagione was impressed not only by the beer, but the effect location played. “We really enjoyed the vibe and the attention to detail,” he says. “It’s a really welcoming place. You can walk the whole property with a beer in your hand. The people who work there were warm and welcoming. In a way, it felt like we were kindred spirits.”

Since the initial meeting, the two have struck up a friendship. This culminated most recently when they paired up for a collaboration called Kelp! I Need Some Honey, an 8% mixed-fermentation farmhouse Ale brewed with Icelandic kelp, Maine grains, and honey from both Delaware and Oxbow. The brew day was extra special, as the two teamed up with not only one another, but with their parents, as well as their spouses and Calagione’s son, Sammy. Since meeting, Sammy has developed a bond with Adams as well, celebrating a shared affinity for both Phish and fishing.

Adams’ greatest strength may be in creating these bonds, undergirded by a profound respect for the brewers that came before him. That’s clear of his relationship with Calagione, and perhaps most evident in his admiration for the other Belgian-focused brewery across town: Allagash Brewing Company.

“I remember the first time I met Tim,” says Perkins. “He shared some of his test batches. He was so likeable and respectful. He was overflowing with compliments for Allagash.”

It’s worth noting here that Portland’s beer scene wasn’t as diverse then as it is now. There was some hop-forward beer trickling out of fermentation tanks, but many of the styles were English-influenced. To add another Belgian-centric brewery to the city’s small craft beer community could have been viewed as stepping on toes. Perkins never saw it that way.

“Out here the skies are really big. There are gardens and beautiful trees and farmed fields. We’re in the middle of a bunch of lakes. We want people to come here and feel at home.”

“Really, even though we do some Saisons [at Allagash], we’re doing different stuff,” he says. “We never felt like someone was coming in and doing the same things we were. And they’re making great beers.”

The teams at Oxbow and Allagash now collaborate yearly for a beer named Rivulet, a crackery, biting, 4% Grisette. A variant of the beer, called Wild Rivulet, is also released after resting in the coolship at either brewery and being inoculated with wild yeast. “We don’t do a ton of collaborations,” says Perkins. “When we do, we want them to be fun. We want to learn from one another. They’re a great group of people [at Oxbow]. We think similarly.”

“WE HAD TO DO IT”

With more than 8,700 recognized craft breweries in the United States, per the Brewers Association, and a marketplace saturated with flashy labels and extreme flavor profiles, it has become incumbent upon breweries to do something that stands out. The brewery experience must be exactly that: an experience. Even more, it has to feel authentic—to reflect, in its own way, the sensibilities of its owners, workers, and the community it inhabits.

In Newcastle, Adams had that. There was a small taproom and bottle shop. There were trails on which to wander and quietly reflect with a beer in hand. What there wasn’t was space.

“We needed to grow,” he says. “Not tremendously, but we definitely needed more space. You know, the tasting room was filled with barrels and everything was bursting at the seams. And instead of cutting down a bunch of trees and downing a bunch of buildings on that beautiful land, we needed to come up with something.”

Adams cites his first trip to Belgium as delivering the blueprint for what needed to happen at Oxbow. He saw Lambic brewing and Gueuze blending taking place in two separate locations and it “not being a big deal,” and realized he had options. In 2014, Oxbow moved into a facility in Portland, an hour or so to the southwest. It was a spot, Adams says, “where we were just going to blend and age all of our beers.” What Adams called a “bonus” was the sizable space for a taproom.

Today, barrels outline the interior of the taproom, graffiti covers the walls behind the foeders, and a space called Gallery 49 showcases works from local artists. The brewery has hosted hip hop acts like Onyx, KRS ONE, and Pharoahe Monch; has organized events for Planned Parenthood; and provided a home base for a “community cleanup.” Outside the tasting room are carefully arranged wooden tables and Adirondack chairs circling a fire pit.

The treasure, though, is completely unique to Oxbow: Who doesn’t want to have a James Beard Award-winning chef’s food right outside their tasting room?

A WORLD-CLASS PAIRING

“We wanted nothing to do with opening something to the public,” laughs Nancy Pugh, owner of the well-regarded Duckfat and the small kitchen operating outside of Oxbow called the Duckfat Frites Shack. “Breweries love when other people will do food. But I can’t say that I would have considered it if it wasn’t Tim.”

Pugh and her husband Rob Evans, who won a James Beard Award in 2009 for Best Chef in the Northeast, opened Duckfat in 2005. When Adams began looking for places to pour Oxbow kegs, Duckfat was one of the first to bite. “Tim and I go way back,” says Pugh. “From the beginning, it was just a natural fit.”

At the time, Pugh and Evans were looking for a commissary kitchen, a place with additional space to cook and store food. When the space next to Oxbow became available, it had the infrastructure for a kitchen already in place. The relationship between Pugh, Evans, and Adams (with a little arm-twisting from the latter) sealed it.

“Rob and Nancy are so critical to the food scene up here,” says Adams. “They’ve been big supporters of ours right out of the gate.”

In 2018, the Duckfat Frites Shack opened to the public. Now, alongside all manner of farmhouse Ales, drinkers can sit down year-round with a plate of poutine, hand-cut Belgian frites fried in duck fat (hence the name), or whatever else is on the rotating menu.

“It’s been awesome,” Adams says, while mentioning that Pugh and Evans have become close enough with him and his wife, Birch Adams, that they’ve traveled to Belgium and Japan together. “It’s been really wonderful. I think it’s mutually beneficial for both parties and people, both ways. It’s especially good for the customers.”

“It is a lot of energy and effort,” says Pugh, “but it’s been really fun and really educational. You do what you do best and it’s been fun to take our product and get more excited to see it paired with a world-class beer.”

WHEELS TURNING

In 2019, Adams and his wife, Birch, set their sights on a third Oxbow location.

“We had been thinking about the notion of another spot and wanting to get involved in making food,” he says. “We talked about taking the same ethos that we have around crafting beer and then put it towards food. We really wanted to do pizza and we wanted to keep it fermentation-focused and grain-focused.”

When a co-worker mentioned that his mother-in-law was selling a parcel of land located on a cross-country ski center in Oxford, a little to the northwest of Portland, Adams was intrigued. “I’d driven by that place thousands of times on the way to ski. That’s when the wheels started turning.”

Here, it’s easy to see Adams’s mind working. He’s pitching me on his idea as if it weren’t already a reality, as if I were a partner in the business, gauging the prospect of the scheme.

“And I was like, ‘Oh man, if we could just keep running the ski program, but have this base lodge, that’s this beautiful wood-fired oven putting out the best pizza, we can make a bunch of Oxbow beer.’ And it’s like, the location’s great. It’s on the way to the mountains. And it’s in a part of Maine that is very underserved in terms of higher-quality restaurants and just food options in general and craft beer spots.”

The property surrounding the 200-year-old barn has been farmed for generations, so the pizzas are topped with fresh herbs, tomatoes, and, to complete the synergy between the brewery locations, meat from the pigs raised at the Newcastle location. As an added advantage, the outdoor-centric spot had the perfect infrastructure to weather the pandemic: It’s open-air, has naturally distanced seating, and plenty of space.

Birch, whom Adams married in 2017, has guided the success of the Oxford location. She sold her own business, a juice bar in Portland, to devote more time to getting it off the ground.

“We wanted to create something comfortable,” she says. “You can come here and sit in nature. Out here the skies are really big. There are gardens and beautiful trees and farmed fields. We’re in the middle of a bunch of lakes. We want people to come here and feel at home.”

Both enjoy the physical nature of the Oxford property: Waking up early to plow trails, then standing all day to bartend before stacking wood at the end of the day. “Once we saw this place, we had a real vision of what it could look like,” says Birch. “We could see how Oxbow could fit into this space, and so I decided to harness all of my energy into this amazing property.”

The pair worked tirelessly on everything from the buildout to the intangibles that would give it the feel they wanted. After COVID hit, they pivoted: What was supposed to be a 50-person indoor restaurant became a 200-person space that could incorporate indoor/outdoor accommodations. The original goal was, according to Birch, “[to] attract people who love the outdoors,” and to serve those customers with authentic farm-to-table, fermentation-forward food grown and produced on the property. The same goals apply now—just on a bigger scale.

Other evolutions came as a welcome surprise. The Oxford location hosted six outdoor weddings in 2021, and accommodating those events will continue to happen, alongside catering to the folks just looking to grab a pizza and some beer on a day off. A plan for a burger bar—also with a local-producer focus—is underway ahead of the winter season.

“The same ethos will apply there: local meat, pickles, and tomatoes from the garden,” says Birch. “Hot food is essential after cross-country skiing.”

BIPARTISAN LONGEVITY

Oxford, Maine is, like the state of Maine, as politically mixed as a place can be.

(“Politically mixed” may be an optimistic understatement. Newcastle, Maine in Lincoln County went blue by a little more than 2,000 votes last year. Oxford County, where the Beer Garden resides, leaned Trump by a little under 3,000 votes. Portland, the left-wing epicenter of the state, went heavily toward Biden, whose 133,000 votes more than doubled his opponent’s tally.)

Still—through the nature trails in Newcastle, the urban aesthetic of the Blending & Bottling facility in Portland, or the cross-country skiing stop in Oxford—Adams and his team hope that they have created something that transcends this dissonance.

“[Attempting to cross partisan lines through beer is something] I’ve always really, really enjoyed, especially opening up in Newcastle, which is a rural part of Maine, and is very politically mixed,” he says. “The locals know we’re a bunch of liberals, but we brew a beer they like to drink and they grow that food we like to eat. They’re the ones that help us with their tractors to get the tanks in here. We couldn’t exist without them.”

Adams hopes his brewery locations can serve as community-gathering places—not just physically, but socially as well. He wants to be a stalwart of each community of which he is a part, to encourage conversation among groups of people who may not otherwise see eye-to-eye.

“And so, it’s kind of through those interactions and [being able to] provide those places in the communities, particularly our two rural locations, you know, in Portland, we’re in a liberal bubble anyways. But out in those spots, you know, we really are proud of the work that we’ve done bringing people together,” he says.

Bringing folks together, especially in a heated political climate, feels elusive in many instances. But despite these differences, people are coming to visit each Oxbow location. They’re coming for the beer, of course, but having good beer simply isn’t enough.

“It sounds pretentious when you’re building a brand that you need to build a lifestyle brand,” Calagione says. “You are selling what you make in your own environment. Tim and the whole team have done a great job creating unique environments.”

In other words, people will come to log a few miles on their skis; people will round Cowshit Corner and sit by the lake for a pint of Farmhouse Pale Ale; people will come bounce at a hip-hop show on a Friday night. But, moreover, they’ll come for the beer, which is nuanced, balanced, delicious, and made by people from the community.

“I also just think about [longevity] as a business owner,” Adams says. “There’s a lot on the line. I need this to work. Fortunately our approach, our ethos is based on how we genuinely feel about beer. We have a focus and an identity and it’s about being a specialist. Combining that specialty with drinkability. Drinkable beers—they’re the past, and they will be the future.”

Adams is “literally betting the farm” that that approach will continue to connect, and draw new drinkers in.

“Trends will come and go, and that’s fun and makes [beer] a true, interesting category and brings new drinkers in left and right to the new shiny things,” he says. “Then we can bring them to our side.”

Words by Matt Osgood
Photos by Mike Lianza