Transcription of Eat Maine #181
Announcer: You’re listening to Love Maine Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle, recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture, and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details. Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.
Kate: The way that the business community has embraced me and helps me grow my business here in Maine, has been just fantastic. I think that the opportunities for small businesses and even startup businesses in Maine are huge unlike other places where I think you would never have the access to the help, resources, networking, in a way that you do in Maine. That’s something, I think, unique to Maine.
Luke: Whiskeys are very regional. They’re very specific to a region. We use a Maine grain. We also use some peyton seaweed from down east. We’re putting a really regional quality to our product. It’s coveted in the Whiskey world to have uniqueness to it. We really feel like we’re able to showcase that Maine quality throughout this product.
Announcer: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Mike Lepage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial, Harding Lee Smith of the Rooms, and Bangor Savings Bank.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 181, airing for the first time on Sunday, March 1st, 2015. This week’s theme is Eat Maine. Maine has a well-deserved reputation for creative and satisfying cuisine. Some of us also enjoy the little extras that make a meal complete. Today, we speak with Kate McAleer of Bixby & Co. and Luke Davidson of Maine Craft Distilling, about their adventurous and specialty food and drink. Kate tickles our taste buds with tales of all-natural chocolate bars while Luke describes how his company distill spirits for Maine Grain. We promise to leave your mouth watering. Thank you for joining us.
From the coast of Maine, many sweet things come. One of these is chocolate. Today, we have with us in the studio, Kate McAleer who is the founder of Bixby & Co., a chocolate-making company that uses organic, wholesome ingredients like real fruits, nuts and cocoa. Kate’s chocolate Factory is on the Water in Rockland and she sells to national and local stores including Whole Foods, Belfast Coop, Westmont Market, Aurora Provisions and Lois’ Natural marketplace.
Kate, what a great job you have?
Kate: It’s very exciting and chocolatey.
Dr. Lisa: Chocolatey, which is, I think that’s the nest thing. You get to do things that make people happy. There’s really not, unless something went wrong with the batch I guess, there’s really nothing that you could do that would present people with any problematic conundrum in their life.
Kate: Hopefully, not. No.
Dr. Lisa: Hopefully not. I was interested to have you come in and talk to us today because you are in an article written by Sophie Nelson from Maine Magazine called Maine Kind of Candy, Bixby & Co. Chocolate and its clever creator, Kate McAleer. She just writes this glowing article about you and your journey, so I wanted our listeners to be able to experience that as well. You’re only 27 years old.
Kate: 27, yes.
Dr. Lisa: That’s pretty young to be in charge of a good size company.
Kate: It’s really exciting how, I started this company when I was 23 turning 24. My mom had always said, “You have a unique opportunity in your 20s to work really hard for yourself. Try and launch something and build something. If it doesn’t work out, you still have your 30s to [inaudible 00:04:18]. That was really, incredibly powerful thing that she had told me at a pretty young age and had encouraged me to go, this completely non-corporate path and learn everything about starting a company and then everything about chocolate from the ground up, literally from scratch. It’s been an incredible learning experience and growing experience for myself. That was the point, in a way, that it was about taking just a giant leap and risk and work really hard and learn a lot about myself and about business and food. It’s been an incredible experience. Challenging but exciting and fun and stressful, all combined together.
Dr. Lisa: I love that idea that your 20s are the time where you can experiment and you can take risks and you can work hard and you have the energy to work hard. But also, it’s not like anything’s lost if you take a risk and it doesn’t pan out.
Kate: Right. You don’t have as many commitments as people further down the road. One of these business classes I was in, one of these men asked a question. He was saying, “I’m in mid-40s. Is it too late for me to become an entrepreneur?” That was a really interesting question to me. I’m not saying that you can’t be an entrepreneur in any age. But there’s a particular time in my life right now where I’m not really committed to anything but Bixby & Co. So I can put a 150% of all of my time and energy. At 1AM in the morning I can be researching freight companies because I’m slightly sleep-deprived and obsessed with finding economic freight out of Maine. Which, I think, is unique to my own characteristic but also probably my age.
Dr. Lisa: You have a connection that is lifelong.
Kate: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Although you’ve lived for just the past 2 years.
Kate: Full-time, right.
Dr. Lisa: Full-time
Kate: As a Mainer, the past two years.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about, what was that initial connection? Why did you start coming here?
Kate: My mom’s family has roots in this Bruce and Rockland area. My parents had bought a second home in the Rockport area before I was really even born. We started coming here for, not just the summer periods, but for Thanksgivings and Winters and year-round second home vacation experiences. We’d always love the foodie scene, the beautiful scenery, the breakwater is one of our favorite family walks with our dog. My parents had retired two years ago. When I was starting up this business, they had said, “We want to move to Maine full-time. We think you should come with us”
I said, “Okay that wasn’t maybe necessarily what I was thinking.” But it’s an amazing place to live, amazing place to eat food and then as it turns, an amazing place to have a business. The way that the business community has embrace me and helps me grow my business here in Maine, has been just fantastic. I think that the opportunities for small businesses and even startup businesses in Maine are huge. Unlike other places where I think you would never have the access to be helped, resources, networking, in a way that you do in Maine. That’s something, I think, unique to Maine.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve had the opportunity pretty early on to share some of your work, we’ll call it, with Cellar Door Winery.
Kate: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: That must have been pretty important.
Kate: Absolutely. Cellar Door Winery is an example of a successful business but also a successful woman on business. A role model, quite frankly. When I moved to Maine, I don’t recall specifically, when I believe Cellar Door Winery reached out to me before I even reached out to them and they said, “Can you drop us off samples of your product?” I ran over there, did the sampling, and they open up some wine and we’re already pairing which bars go with which of their wines. They invited to come and do samplings, which are incredible experiences at the Winery in Lincolnville. Many fascinating people walk through that location in Lincolnville.
Some of my biggest networking for business opportunities actually occurred at Cellar Door Winery. Again, you have to be open to doing these things but then things come together unexpectedly and in exciting fashion.
Dr. Lisa: You, originally, were going to focus on chocolate. You weren’t going to focus on real food at all. You’ve traveled a lot. You spent time abroad in China and France where there was a candy focus of course. But, originally, you graduated from New York University with a degree in East Asian Studies and minors in Art History and French. Then you began graduate work at the new school studying the history of decorative arts and design.
Kate: Yup.
Dr. Lisa: There’s a lot of interesting things.
Kate: Yeah. I like to call myself a fan of cultural history. Be it through objects, art or history, history. In high school, I lived abroad as a high school student in China and in France, living with host families, being immersed in those cultures. Those were incredible experiences that had major impacts on who I am and, obviously, what I’m now doing.
For me, I was trying to figure out how to tie together all of these widespread interest. What could be this one thing that would tie it together? I was pursuing, in Art History, Decorative Arts career. Then decided to just take a total pivot. Some of my friends called it a quarter life crisis. But I think it was just … You start going down something then you realize, “Okay this is really interesting. It’s intellectually interesting but it’s not going to be enough to fulfill everything that I’m looking for in terms of a full-time impassioned career effort.
Thinking about how am I going to wake up every day and want to work incredibly hard at something and tie in so many of my interests, owning your own company was one medium to which you could do that. But then in the mode of food, which is such an interesting medium through which so many things can be expressed. Then, chocolate, as a lifelong chocolate lover, then having been exposed to chocolate in France. The French, they’re very opinionated. They have a lot of opinions that Americans don’t know what real chocolate is they don’t know how to even eat properly and all these stereotypes about Americans. I learned about what it means to eat good food and appreciate good food in France. That translated into, eventually, the launching of Bixby & Co.
Dr. Lisa: What about this whole cultural element of chocolate? You had a [inaudible 00:12:05] in the history of Decorative Arts and Design, was there anything interesting to your as far as the historical aspects of chocolate?
Kate: Chocolates are super food. It comes from the cacao bean, which is grown along the equator. It’s, literally, fruits from the cacao trees that are pried open with [inaudible 00:12:26] and these little cocoons of mushy white stuff are taken out and then the beans are inside of those little cocoons. Then they’re fermented in the sun. They’re broken down what becomes what we know as chocolate. It’s a super food, number one, with full of anti-oxidants and interesting properties. It has an amazing history just in terms of, the very first chocolate, people drink it as opposed to eating it.
It’s had a really interesting history not only in Europe but also the American role of developing what became chocolate candy. It was fascinating ingredient. Also, it’s an interesting chemistry process. Chocolate is full of cocoa butter, which is the fat from the cacao bean. Cocoa butter is a polymorphic substance. These different fat crystals form because of cocoa butter. The art of chocolate making is really the art of tempering, which is forming the correct crystals. There is this heating and cooling and heating process that you have to do to make chocolate, to have it be in temper and have the right snap and taste.
Just the art of mastering, tempering of chocolate, was the extreme challenge at first and something that I’m still becoming a master of. That was really interesting from a just like a chefing point of view. Having to learn how to temper and learn all the history of chocolate and how it interacts with different things. I learned about that in pastry school and then really dove into it. How do you make chocolate? How do you make real chocolate.
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Dr. Lisa: Tell me about your decision to go to pastry school. That’s a very specific thing that anyone would choose to do in her 20s.
Kate: Yup. When I decided to leave the Art History path that I was headed down, started brainstorming about type of business I would want to run because I’ve decided I wanted to run my own business. Started coming up with these ideas of being interested in chocolate and candy. I knew nothing, really, about how to make. I knew how to eat chocolate or candy but not how to make it. Instead of returning to graduate school, I did a 6-month pastry program in New York city, dove into that. In pastry school, they have different sections like baking, cake making, then there’s chocolate.
The chocolate section was for one week. I became very enamored with it. It was very challenging and difficult. A lot of my other fellow students just said, “I’m never going to work with chocolate”, and decided to pursue it [inaudible 00:17:20]. Began prototyping what became Bixby Bars while also trying to network within the business realm of how do you start up a business, because pastry school doesn’t necessarily focus on how to run a food business. It’s more of how do you make food. It’s not even how do you make food on a larger scale either.
There was a big level of, “Okay I have training but how do I translate that into scaling up?” One of the resources in Maine that’s been incredible to help with that as an example was Maine manufacturing Extension partnership. It’s this group of, I call them consultant experts that help you scale up your production facilities and to help you figure out what types of equipment you need to help increase your batch sizes, etc. There is those types of transitions from just being strictly artisanal pastry chef to becoming a larger producer.
Dr. Lisa: That’s an interesting consideration because there are many people who would do something entrepreneurial for the love of the product, let’s say in your case chocolate. But maybe not have quite the experience of the right connections to do as you described, scale up. It’s a business that it is its own thing, it’s got a very specific set of skill that you wouldn’t necessarily have from just focusing on the part itself.
Kate: Correct.
Dr. Lisa: Do your parents have background that might have been helpful to you? I know that your mother was in the health care administration, they call that industry. They both been working with you on your products since she moved to Maine. What has there, I guess, presence meant to you as you worked on this?
Kate: It’s been critical from just a personal and then business point of view. They’ve been incredibly supportive in both ends. Yes, they do bring a level of business acumen that I didn’t necessarily possess. But then I sought out all these amazing programs in Maine and outside of Maine to come up to steam in terms of business knowledge or education, if you will. I attended the top gun program here in Maine put on by the Maine center for entrepreneurial development, which is an incredible program. It only costs $500. It’s highly subsidized. It really costs more than that and that’s startup business education. I attended the Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses program through Babson College, which is like a mini-MBA.
Then, just through some of my other certification agencies, attended various webinars or conference, just trying to gleam as much as I can about … There’s general business knowledge, but then, the food industry is actually very complex, far more complex than I ever knew it to be. There’s people who make the products but then there is this whole supply chain of, most products out there should just qualify. Don’t make the products themselves. They are really brands that have it made by manufacturers or co-manufacturers. Then it goes into distributors and then it goes on the retail shelves. Actually, the manufacture rate, we make the product, we ship the product and then it goes through distribution and to retail shelves.
That’s a very complex chain of interactions that is not obvious to me before getting into the business. Then navigating that complex world of distribution and just even the complexities of how getting your product on the shelf is was something I had to learn from the ground up. Both my parents, didn’t have background in that either. But we all approached it with a certain amount of educated approaches to general things and then trying to figure out the nuances of the specific industry. But we’re still learning. Nothing is immediate or perfect but I would say the important thing was tapping into as many resources and networking helped as possible so that you could navigate those complexities in a more potentially smoother fashion.
Other small manufacturing companies are some of my best friends now. They make amazing products but then we also talk about the complexities of shipping or freight or bar codes, etc.
Dr. Lisa: It’s really interesting for me to hear you talking about this because I think you’re right. I’m just your average consumer, go to the grocery store, there’s something on the shelf, pick it up, look at it, go to the cashier, buy it, and then if it’s chocolate, I eat it.
All of the steps that you’ve just described and the knowledge that’s associated with, I guess, each of them. That’s a process that really must have taken some time to learn about.
Kate: Absolutely. I love to ask questions. I’m not afraid of asking questions. I think some of the people I’ve interacted with in the industry think it’s funny how many questions I have. Sometimes they don’t even have answers. It’s very complex. You have to keep asking the questions and keep trying to navigate the complexities. But it’s certainly not an obvious business structure whatsoever. In terms of going to retail shelves, if you are to open your own store, that would be direct to the customers in a much different interaction of how your project gets into hands of customers.
My very first customer was Whole Foods Market. I had this dream of being in Whole Foods. One of the NYU dorms has a Whole Foods Market in it. I’d been shopping in Whole Foods, observing Whole Foods. I developed this relationship with Whole Foods and had to learn about the complexities of that network a little bit as we went along, which was interesting and scary at the same time. Certainly, I think the key was networking with other people to help you navigate the complexities.
Dr. Lisa: As you’re doing this, you’re simultaneously continuing to develop great tasting chocolate bars.
Kate: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Which is probably even more important to your goal.
Kate: Yeah. The very first order with Whole Foods I made entire by hand. Every single bit of hit was handmade, hand wrapped, hand packaged. In the past, just 6 months, we’ve had an incredible infusion of some much needed equipment to help us with the production of things. I won the the Gorham Savings Bank launch pad, $30,000 cash price. One of the very few food companies to actually win a prize. Most of those funds really go to tech companies. It was really cool that they thought we were a serious business. Let it be, a food business. We purchased chocolate melting tanks. Chocolate comes in solid form and you have to melt it to use it in the production form. These big bats now have melted chocolate that we can access all the time which was, if you don’t have the melted chocolate, you can’t keep producing this. We had this constant issue of just not enough liquid chocolate, as I call it.
The Gorham Savings Bank launch pad [inaudible 00:25:31] were just an amazing addition to our little factory. Then I received a loan from Whole Foods Market and purchased a wrapping machine which we fondly called “Bix the Dragon”. You have to keep feeding it bars so he’s happy. Going from hand wrapping which used to take days to machine wrapping which is a huge improvement on, not only my time in the factory and the other people’s time in the factory, but just efficiency-wise, it was like an 1800% improvement. It enables us to grow further.
There’s definitely bottlenecks that you have to overcome when you’re in a growth period with your business. That’s been really exciting additions the past 6 months. I look back on it and I think you’re always planning strategically for these big moves and if they hadn’t actually come through I’m not sure what I would have done because the production that we’ve been doing over the past 6 months, it’s just been incredible compared to when we were planning for it. It all worked out and all came together in time for just a big increase in demand.
Dr. Lisa: How many bars are you selling on a regular basis?
Kate: We’re making any more from 3,000 to 5,000 bars a day. Then, selling them across the country into Natural Food Stores and Coops Grocery stores, those types of outlets, as well as online. More and more people are caring about natural foods, natural products and it doesn’t necessarily have to just be a in natural food stores. Could it be at airports, or could it be at trains. I’m just giving you examples of just other, even golf courses. More outlets for the products so that some more people can have access to Bixby bars which is healthier candy or healthier chocolate.
Plans are, I hope to expand our factory in the future in Rockland and continue to grow our production abilities. I think another personal goal is play more golf, get out there. When you start up a business, you make a lot of personal sacrifices to, not only your hobbies, but just personal time in general. I think trying to claim a little bit of that back from chocolates so I can go play golf instead of make chocolate would be good for me in the future.
Dr. Lisa: Kate how do people find out about Bixby & Co?
Kate: We have a website. It’s www.bixbyco.com. We’re on Facebook. You can like our Facebook page, facebook.com/bixbyco. We’re on Instagram, we’re on Pinterest and we’re on Twitter, all sort of outlets on which you can find us. Or, in your local health food store or coop, you can hopefully find Bixby bars there.
Dr. Lisa: People who are listening can also read about Bixby in Maine Magazine in the March issue, our food issue. It’s great to talk to somebody who who is as passionate as you are clearly about not only what you’re producing but also just the process of producing and being in the world. It’s wonderful to spend time upon who is enthusiastic as one could possibly be about life. I appreciate your coming in. I’ve been talking with Kate McAleer. She is the founder of Bixby & Co., a chocolate-making company that uses organic wholesome ingredients, located on the Water in Rockland. Available nationally and locally. I’m certain, internationally at some point. Thanks so much for coming in.
Kate: Oh thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci Booth: When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing, from the work that was piled up on your desk and just looked up? I know that during the course of my days, I often forget to take a moment or two to just breathe, look up at the sky, and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe, but when I do, I feel energized because in those moments I’m able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow.
Sometimes those are the aha moments. If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we were doing and dream a little about our business futures, not only would we feel a great sense of calm but we may come to realize that these dreams can in fact come true.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need; boothmaine.com.
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Dr. Lisa: It’s always a lot of fun to bring the pages of Maine Magazine to life in a different way. Today, we have with us an individual who is featured in the food issue of Maine magazine, which is our March 2015 issue. This is Luke Davidson. Luke is the Chief Distiller and owner of Maine Craft Distilling in Portland. He was raised in a self-sufficient, agrarian Maine community, sustained by a barter economy between neighboring farms. He’d always wanted to combine his sense of the Maine community, his love of agriculture and his desire to make Whiskey. On October 2011, that dream was realized when he opened Maine Craft Distilling. Thanks so much for coming in.
Luke: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: It’s interesting that your dream was to bring with you very different but also similar elements together. Not a lot of people would think, “Oh I want to do all these things and I want to be a distiller.”
Luke: There’s a lot of history around that for sure. Agriculture often grains were unable to be stored in a way through the winters and they would do that by distilling them or maybe fermenting them into beers of other things. There’s always been a close tie to that. It was a way for me to do both. To be involved in the food community and also in the real Maine agricultural community. It was fun to be able to try to put those together. There’s also a lot of figuring and wrench-turning in the process between the two that I was really drawn to so that was exciting for me.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about growing up. You were raised in a self-sufficient agrarian Maine community, which was sustained by a barter economy. Not many people have that experience.
Luke: My parents were involved in or drawn to the whole back to the land movement of the late 60s, the nearing movement in that and the good life, a book that inspired them both. They moved to Maine during that time. They settled in the community that was very much old school name. It was beautiful. We call it, stone walls and field that were still full of hay instead of trees. It was a really neat place. A lot of people were doing the same thing. Like-minded at that time. There were hippies and they were back to the landers. My parents were kind of in-between there I’d say. They were short haired hippies, maybe it was the way to look at them.
We had a big community of the back to the land folks. There’s a lot of pickup softball games in the summer and potlucks and the Belfast coop was definitely a big piece of our life in that time.
That was in Jefferson. From Jefferson, Washington up into Camden, was a very unclave of this movement. We were involved in that but also my father and mother were both very drawn to the simple life of the indigenous, let’s say, Mainers. We had in our little community, we had probably 6 or 7 old family farms that were still in existence with an old barn out back and barely any running water. In fact we’re the only ones who had hot water on our road and our road rolled out to nowhere. It was really, really an interesting time.
It wasn’t an easy thing for sure, definitely, most of the people that were drawn to that time, a lot of them after found other ways to move. They stopped heating with wood and whatever and moved into the easier times. Even the people that lived there did the same thing. That’s why it was interesting to me is to watch that change as I grew up and move on and come back to visit and actually both my parents have move from that area as well.
But a lot of that simple and interesting life had disappeared. The farms fell down. I was also looking at why that happened. I was trying to figure out in some way to see where that piece fell apart.
A lot of things happened. I think large box doors and inexpensive food came in. It was hard too. It was a hard lifestyle. As easier ways came about, people were drawn to them and that makes sense too, but a lot of that whole piece disappeared. What’s been really fun is to watch it come back, actually, in a different way but very earnest and solid as the, obviously, MAFTA is a big scene now in a good way, there’s a lot of the local food. I don’t know that it ever died for sure but it’s really the rebirth of it has come and it’s really exciting to be part of that. I saw that activation. My father especially still is involved in that piece.
He lives in Brooks now and he’s full of a lot of that. Still been able to watch, see him be continuous with it. Then, I’ve watched it come through inaudible new way, in a youthful way and wanted to be a part of that again. Originally, I was a carpenter throughout this process and build houses and barns and things. I’d lived out of the state and came back with my wife 18 years ago. It’s very hard work and it’s not always prevalent in Maine. Making a living in Maine especially outside of Portland is not an easy thing.
I was always looking at different things. My wife and I had tried farming for sure. We had a milk delivery business for a while. With other things like foods and what not, local foods and things. The great recession put a nail in that coffin. But kept looking at other avenues and one was to malt and grains, because Maine has a lot of grain grown in the state. It’s not really that well-known. A lot of it is a secondary crop to potatoes.
The potato farmers are finding that it’s profitable and actually desirable than grains and so they’re starting to really build that piece up. I was looking at ways of, there aren’t any malt houses on the East Coast for sure and was looking at different ways of trying to turn that grain into some more value-added product. As I looked at closely, I’d work with CEI and some other organizations around that and did some business planning. There wasn’t a lot of margin, very, very small margin. As you look further down the line, you’ll see it being the value-added comes later, much later either in the beer or whiskey, I would say. I was drawn to that piece. It’s a desirable product. There’s a lot of lure around it. I feel like Maine has a really interesting lifestyle. We’re talking earlier about that whole mystique of Maine and the character of Maine. It’s got a national draw. I saw that as a good way to actually add value, to even more, to what I wanted to do. It’s a very similar and even kind of people to the Scottish realm. The type of whiskey we make is really Scottish style whiskey. It boiled that all up and distilled it and here we are.
Dr. Lisa: Having read the good life at a time in my existence where I had small children and there was something really appealing about that, the simple way of living. But when I started to incorporate some of these things into my lifestyle, they’re very time-consuming. In its simplicity, it can often become complicated. I think this idea that you are trying to pull in the things that have worked from the past and learn lessons from them and make them into something that might work in the future, is really appealing to a lot of people.
Luke: It’s very exciting to be a part of that. That piece, it’s actually like you said, watching the simplicity turn into hardship has been an interesting place. People are drawn to the simplicity but the hardship is definitely … They’re drawn to the bigger story. To be able to pull pieces from that and apply them to making it a little bit easier and still be able to experience that story and more. It’s definitely a big responsibility. I think it’s a big piece of what is making us interesting to people. Is that, we are, and genuinely not in some sort of propped up or façade type way, we’re actually applying a lot of those pieces of Maine that people that they enjoy and are making something really neat with it.
Your point is interesting. I think everyone is drawn to that simple life and that the book was a very much an example of that. Everybody, my wife and I included, we jumped in very deep into that spot. I had grown with it but actually it’s a very similar process because I watched my parents do the same thing. At that time I didn’t really know it but now I look back after having experienced it myself. It just wear out. You say, particularly now, we actually have to have light outside of that place. That’s where it’s really hard. But I get to live in both places by doing this and that’s what’s really fun.
Dr. Lisa: Yes. You were talking to me about your children who are both in high school now. They enjoy living, you live in Freeport. They enjoy some aspects of suburbia but you also get to live on a farm and you also get to have a job that you like and you get to work with an authentic product and authentic Maine people. That really is pulling together, not just saying, “I’m going to be over here doing the good life back to the lander thing.” Or, “I’m going to be over here and be in suburbia.” You’re saying, “I’m going to create my own thing out of this and make it really work for me and my family.”
Luke: It’s, for sure, a piece of that that I’ve always carried with me is that I love what I’ve been most drawn to in the Maine story, is there’s a Yankee can do quality to a lot of Mainers. This still persist kind of thing. There’s a lot of pride around that. It’s definitely a piece that I have taken from the people that I grew up with. I’ve seen, make literally, vehicles out of seven different vehicles and things like that, I’m drawn to that place.
Also, some sort of a provincial quality that is not entirely enjoyable or easy to live in. We’ve definitely taken a silk purse in terms of, or as I was here I should say and trying to make a silk purse out of it in our little in Freeport and keeping the more … Like you just said, allowing my family, it’s a balance point to be involved in the world in a way that is modern and involved. But still try to keep exposed to some of the interesting points of what I think is important which is a. Hard work and b. Understanding the world around you and being a part of the bigger picture in the system and of farming and agriculture and life systems and things like that. It’s been really fun. Definitely, have been ups and downs in that process. There are days where it’s harder than not doing that but it’s been fun.
If you ask my kids, I think there’s a piece of them in there that would definitely agree with me but a lot of them would be still arguing that it’s better to go to the mall and get a cellphone.
Dr. Lisa: I, currently, have two teenagers and a 21-year-old so I feel for you because I think that we all struggle with that. It’s also, having interviewed your father for the radio show, he goes by a different name.
Luke: [inaudible 00:43:35]
Dr. Lisa: [inaudible 00:43:37] and he also is in the feature of Maine Magazine. He took a different path entirely. What’s nice for me to see is that you totally respect that. He has a different life that he’s chosen, you value that, you give him credit for that, you’re choosing this life and you’re trying to figure it out and being authentic yourself but also, a situation your children are growing up, you’re giving them the space to try to understand how they fit everything together as well.
Luke: It’s actually, I hadn’t put that all together until right now. It’s a neat thought. I will say that in that pursuit, a lot of it is genesis, is definitely in my parents’ pursuit. Their exposure for me of that time and their excitement about it definitely affected me in a good way. To watch my father move through his life and still maintain a lot of that in is path exactly as you said, it’s been helpful to watch him make his path. His activation and support for mine, has been really nice too. We all have taken something from that is what I’m trying to say. Now, I can only hope that, to my children would be in the similar vein. They are definitely excited about what we’re doing. There’s a lot of fun in our space even though it is spirits and something that my children aren’t actually enjoying right now. There’s a culture in our community that’s being developed that they definitely feel.
Right there under the very simple things like my son will hop right to grand and my daughter will help wash dishes or what not in the distillery. My son plays and he’s always contributing to any kind of event we have in that way. There’s been a lot of family community around this and then the bigger picture community. For me, the most rewarding thing that’s been happening is the community they’re supporting us in what we’re doing has been really, really helpful and exciting. We’re feeling it in all kids of ways right now.
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Dr. Lisa: I know that you wanted to make whiskey, that’s what your product is. Tell me a little bit about that product itself.
Luke: My original goal and I’d say dream or desire was to make a whiskey because I’m drawn to that. I like the story of whiskey. I like the product of whiskey. It’s a great way to illustrate the region. It’s like a concept in wine especially when I was coming to in the food world. Whiskeys are very regional, much like cheeses and, like I say, wines and all that. They’re very specific to a region. That’s why I really as drawn to the whiskey piece because we could really apply a region to a product.
In our whiskey, for example, we use Maine grain, before malt on premise which is very rare there’s only 5 other distilleries in the country that do it. They still do a fair amount in Scotland. That’s really a process of allowing the grains to activate the grain a little bit, to allow some of the enzymes to come out that makes it usable for us to convert starch in the grain to sugar.
It is done in a really large scale out in the Midwest and in Canada. On a small scale for the farmers that we use here locally, it’s hard to get that kind of specific grain. Also, when you do it on premise and in small scale, it changes the grain in a different way and makes it very, very regional, we found. We use a Maine grain, which is different, for sure, when we’ve noticed that because sometimes we do run out of Maine grain or can’t get a supply. There are certain times we have to bring in other grains and the product is definitely different. We have to blend it in in different ways. It’s not bad it’s just different. It doesn’t hit the mark of our profile.
We also use some peyton seaweed from down east and we smoke some of the grains and apply that flavor to it as well. We’re putting a really regional quality to our product. That’s what the whiskey piece, it’s coveted in the Whiskey world to have uniqueness to it. We really feel like we’re able to showcase that Maine quality throughout this product. That was my original draw. The lure and mystique around whiskey felt very parallel to Maine story that I was trying to tell. It was a great to showcase that product. But the problem with whiskey is that it takes long time to age. You put in the barrel and let it sit until you have all this capital sitting on a shelf, some other rack. You need to do something else while your rent checks, bills, keep coming in and insurances and all that. We knew that but it became very, very clear that that was something we needed to not have on the shelf.
We could leave that or she’ll be able to figure something else out. We started to make some other products. We call ourselves a farm to flask distillery. We were looking at other things that were fermentable and made a good spirit product that could go out of market much faster than what we wanted to do with the whiskey. We came up with a few different products that were definitely not whiskey and much more put on the shelf of it quickly kind of product.
We got excited about it. We had a couple of new ideas. We keep coming up with some other stuff so now we have nine products. They’re all being received really well. They’re all unique that’s the best part. The part that’s really exciting is we use Maine grain for all of them. We [inaudible 00:50:28] only the whiskey grain. We have found a supplier that does segregate the Maine grain, one of the malt houses does in Canada and sells back to us in Maine. It’s a little different than our malted grain. But we’re able to use it in all of our grain products.
We use Maine blueberries for our blueberry moonshine. We use Maine maple syrup. We’re really adding Maine, Maine, Maine, to this whole thing and really playing that story out. It’s coming together really well. All the products are very unique and we feel that is because of the regional quality of them.
Dr. Lisa: What I’m often struck by is this idea that you can be dedicated to creating something. But in Maine, unless you actually know how to market it and unless you know how to get it distributed and unless you know how to be really a business person, a small business owner, it is going to just sit on the shelf. How did you gather all of these skills and all of this knowledge? Is it something that you, it just came along?
Luke: In some ways, yes. I will say that, I definitely was just, I would say just a carpenter but I mean, I was a carpenter with a small crew that build houses prior to this. I’ve been drawn to the concept of marketing and design and things like that. I’m an artist on the side in a lot of ways. I’m just a closet artist in some ways or just drawing and painting at home thing.
I, originally, was a furniture maker, early days. I’ve always had that maker piece in me. I guess lots of things happened is that once you realize how expensive all of those things are, and applying the Yankee can do quality that is in me, I’ve found that we need to do something to get the stuff noticed. It’s became, it snowballed, we learn a little bit as we went and build upon the ideas of marketing. Very early days, actually, Kep Goldberg was really, really, one of my partners. I was friends with them. We were able to do some really nice early work with them in town. Great marketing firm in town. They gave me some ideas to step, live and then we snowballed, built on that. I had a great designer in town Scott Whitehouse who is an amazing designer, graphic designer.
We have a still at work called the FrankenStill, which is a bunch of different parts from the food industry that we’ve welded together and made it really usable and very wonderful still. Because actually there another piece in the same vein is that equipment is scarily expensive. Instead of spending $480,000 on a still we spent $9,000 and we weld it together ourselves and it’s a wonderful still. Much to the same avenue, we took a lot of marketing ideas and Frankenize them and made our own little story. If you come by the distillery you’ll see that is not very polished but ti tells the story for sure and there’s a lot going on in this space, there’s a lot of story being told that’s in this pace.
It was a matter of need that we came up with our design that why I learned of it is, need. Panic almost sometime.
Dr. Lisa: I think it’s very interesting that distilling just transforming, some creating something from a variety of things has become your life’s work in many different ways. In the distilling ideas, distilling spirits. I do think that there’s a Maine aspect to that but I also wonder if there is even a generational aspect to it. I see a lot of people in our generation who have taken some of the great things. Maybe it’s every generation, maybe it’s every successive generation, that we can take some of the greatest things from here and there and here and there and be open enough to make the right connections and create something out of them.
Luke: It gives meaning to what we do. Some tied to our history and some betterment of it, I think that lose sense of purpose. I think there’s a lot of that problem. It’s not just modern times, it’s always been that way. Without building upon what we have from our past, let’s say or community or around us, a lot of people lose sense of purpose, it feels like. I definitely feel like I’m gaining sense of purpose by that combining of those things.
I think that’s why people are drawn to our story is that there is some of that happening. I feel most rewarded and energized by not just the act of distilling which is, it’s definitely there’s a craft to it and there’s a lot of learning involved in that. But it is not the most exciting part of our process for sure. Basically, it’s a waiting process. Basically in essence boiling water in some ways. That’s not really what we’re doing but that’s the same process. It can take 9 hours to do that.
I have some great help now, people that really are right hand people, women and men there that are really, really helping the process. But that isn’t the most exciting piece of what we’re doing. It is about the community. It’s about building the brand and the story. That’s another thing that’s really important we really want people to know about what we’re doing. We’re not making alcohol delivery system. We’re applying a region and the quality of a product. It’s a cultural piece. We want people to enjoy this and not actually just, we’re not even marketing as something that you have a lot of. It’s not something that we’re interested in being. It’s more about the story and like you said, the distilling of many things and experience piece of it, community and a region, that’s really what we’re pushing.
Dr. Lisa: Luke, I encourage people to go to Maine magazine and to read the article about Maine Craft Distilling. I know that they’re going to want to learn more about the work that you’re doing. Do you have a website?
Luke: We do. It’s maincraftdistilling.com.
Dr. Lisa: If you’re listening and you want to hear about the spirits, the actual, literal spirits that are coming out of Maine and being created from Maine Grains and the work that Luke Davidson is doing, then go to his website or go to the March Food issue of Maine magazine.
We’ve been speaking with Luke Davidson who is the Chief Distiller and owner of Maine Craft Distilling in Portland. Luke it’s really been a pleasure to talk to you today.
Luke: Thank you for thinking of us. Have fun.
Dr. Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 181, Eat Maine. Our guests have included Kate McAleer and Luke Davidson.
For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Read more about Bixby & Co. And Maine Craft Distilling in the March Issue of Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on twitter and see my running travel, food, and wellness photos as Bountiful One on Instagram.
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