Allagash Brewing Company

One beer at the start

Oats, coriander, and Curaçao orange peel sit at the center of the beer Rob Tod, founder and James Beard Award winner, began with at Allagash Brewing Company in Portland. He trained at Siebel Institute in Chicago before starting the brewery in 1995, and the first decision still defines the house: one Belgian-style wheat beer, Allagash White. Tod has put the origin plainly: “I wanted to start with one beer, and one beer only: a Belgian-style wheat beer called Allagash White.” That sentence carries the discipline of the place. Not a range, not a spread of styles, but a single point of concentration, built from wheat-beer structure and a brewer’s appetite for yeast character, spice, haze, and texture. The role he holds today is still tied to that beginning. The founder has stayed with the house he started, and the bar on Riverton Drive reads as an extension of that long first choice, with Allagash White not treated as a relic but as the beer that taught the room its grammar.

Wheat, peel, coriander, haze

The program rests on a Belgian-inspired method rather than a novelty cycle. It is a compact list that asks for control at the bench because each element can overstate itself. The oats bring body; the coriander and peel move through the beer as seasoning, not garnish. The haze is part of the construction, a wheat-beer opacity that belongs to the glass rather than a surface effect added after the fact. At the bar, that gives the flagship its place in the hand: pale, cloudy, aromatic, and built for repetition. The house’s public language around the beer does not lean on production figures, and it does not need to. The method is legible in the pour. Allagash White became the signature because Tod began with a narrow field and stayed inside it long enough for the details to matter.

The bar under glass

The room keeps brewing close to the drinker. Beneath the glass bar surface, brewing ephemera sits in view, not as decoration removed from labor but as a reminder of the tools, labels, fragments, and decisions that gather around a beer over time. The bar has a conversational pitch, with the industrial bones of the brewery softened by a rustic welcome. It is a working brewery bar, not a sealed tasting chamber. Beer enthusiasts lean in over the counter, and the surface gives them something to read while the glass settles. The back bar belongs to a place that made its reputation through Belgian inspiration in Portland, Maine, then kept returning to the beer that opened the door.

Award held by the producer

In 2019, Allagash Brewing Company received the James Beard Award for Outstanding Wine, Spirits, or Beer Producer, recognition attached to this Portland brewery and to the long program Tod began there. The same named beer sits in the glass. If the room has a center of gravity, it is still Allagash White.