Brews Cruise Blog

The Maine Brew Bus is pleased to welcome Jack Van Paepeghem to our faculty in the position of Curriculum Coordinator. Learn more about Jack and what he can share with all of us. Jack behind the bar at Oxbow Blending and Bottling. Heather Steeves photo for MaineToday.com Our faculty has a new team member, Jack Van Paepeghem of Portland. Jack joins us to serve in the key position of Curriculum Coordinator. In this role, Jack will help improve the level of beer education among our own team members, the hospitality industry, and the general public. We pride ourselves that our theme is education focused brewery tours and more. Our founder Zach was a teacher for a long time.  We use converted school buses on our tours, and we use the term “Guidance Counselor” to describe our guides. On our tours you going to…

The Maine Brew Bus was featured this week on the website Business Insider. Ride along with video editor Stephen Parkhurst on a recent Beast of the yEast tour. Maine native Stephen Parkhurst is a video editor for the popular website Business Insider. He contacted us in December with an idea, he was coming back to town for a weekend and wanted to jump on one of our tours and film a video as part of a series on Portland, Maine. Of course we were all for it! We set him up with our popular Beast of the yEast tour which features our partners Maine Mead Works, Bunker Brewing Company, Rising Tide Brewing Company, and Oxbow Blending and Bottling. As most of our tours do, it begins and ends at the Craft Beer Cellar in Portland. We also used some connections…

We try to hire team members that are in constant pursuit of learning more about craft beer. In the process, our staff are often unknowingly “auditioning” to work in the industry. See what some of our past faculty are brewing and doing in craft beer. Some of our staff came to us with a pretty good knowledge of the local scene, but not really about brewing beer. Some had relocated to Portland, and had a really good background in brewing but nothing lined up quite yet in Portland. Then there is Bob, who had neither local knowledge or a beer brewing background. We like to mention Bob because he solicited a job from us (one that didn’t actually exist with us at the time) while he was still living in California. He had a plan to leave his profession as a…

One of the first beer festivals of the year is scheduled this Saturday at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. Join us for either session of Bangor On Tap.  The beginning of the year is traditionally not a busy time for beer festivals in Maine. The potentially dicey weather and cold temperatures has meant that craft beer loving Mainers stay pretty close to home in January. But last year, Townsquare Media brought to Maine a beer festival called America On Tap. The company, which owns a number of Maine media outlets including popular radio stations, was able to promote the event to an interested and younger demographic than your typical beer festival. Premiering in Portland during a snowstorm with a capacity crowd, the event helped bridge the gap for people looking to enjoy some new craft beers even during the…

South Portland’s first brewery in over ten years opens this week. See behind the scenes of the Fore River Brewing Company. One of the benefits of operating The Maine Brew Bus is being able to be part of the inside track when new breweries open up in Maine. Often we are written right into the business plan, and it’s safe to say that we already have plans to include new breweries on our tours well before they open. A look at the spacious tasting room and large bar at Fore River Brewing Company in South Portland. Such is the case with Fore River Brewing Company which opens to the public Thursday afternoon. I first became aware of Fore River Brewing almost two years ago when something floated across social media indicating that a new brewery was coming soon. We found…

We’re sorry if you were hoping to go on a tour today. We are taking time this afternoon to thank our staff with a post-holiday gathering. Like many service and hospitality related businesses, we are too busy leading up to the holidays to properly take time and thank our staff for their hard work. We did have a small laser tag outing in December, but not everyone was able to make that. The team did find out that laser tag is also hard work! So we are not running tours today, instead we are all gathering at a jungle hideaway for good cheer and great beer! We will even have a couple of new team members joining us, good people you will learn more about in the coming weeks. There may be a report about the party, then again there…

Driving our buses is not like driving a car. There are 14 people that are depending on our driver to operate safely while they have fun on a tour. Learn more about our driver safety programs. Many people have “some experience” driving a larger vehicle. Maybe it was grandpa’s station wagon, that 15-P van during college activities or AmeriCorps service, or the U-Haul that was used to move across town or across the country. When we ask our prospective employees if they have a comfort level driving our buses, it is a serious question. Not everybody wants to have that responsibility. And we absolutely want to know that up front. Each tour is staffed with two employees, one as a guide and one who’s sole job is to drive the tour safely. Although we often have employees that are dually-trained as…

Thinking about having some fun after the stressful holidays? Maybe use your brand new shiny Maine Brew Bus gift certificate? Why not hop on the #1 TripAdvisor Tour in Portland! Limited tour spots are available on our tours this weekend. And for Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend (that’s next weekend) we have added additional Sunday and Monday tours too! Here is what we have available: Saturday January 9 Suds and Spirits – 10:30a-3:00p several seats available Beerunch! – 10:30a-3:00p 1 seat available Southern Crawl – 2:30-7:00p 1 seat available Beast of the yEast – 3:30-7:00p 1 seat available Friday January 15 Casco Fiasco – 10:30a-3:00p 7 seats available Pours and Pirates – 4:00-6:30p 1 seat available Saturday January 16 Beerunch! – 10:30a-3:00p 1 seat available Southern Crawl – 2:30-7:00p several seats available Beast of the yEast – 3:30-7:00p 1 seat available Sunday January 17 Drinks About Town – 1:00-4:30p several…

Taking a Maine Brew Bus tour before attending a local minor league sports game is a winning combination. Beginning last winter, we began a partnership with the Portland Pirates AHL hockey team by offering a special 3-stop tour before select Friday night home games. We called it the Pours and Pirates tour and we picked up our guests late afternoon at the arena and brought them back 30 minutes before the puck dropped for the game that night. With the hockey game ticket included, the guests had nothing to worry about except have a great time. Don’t worry, we didn’t let Salty Pete actually drive the tour. The tour and ticket combination was priced very affordably (actually it’s our best value), and local hockey fans who were already planning to attend a hockey game during the season were now excited…

The Maine Brew Bus is a proud partner of the Portland, Maine Chapter of the United States Bartenders’ Guild. We specialize in providing a literal vehicle to assist in their professional development. In Portland, we are lucky to have a very active chapter of the United States Bartenders’ Guild (USBG). The USBG was started in California in 1948, and now has spread to be active in over 50 cities nationwide. Our Chapter in Portland was formed just a year ago, and was officially chartered in March, 2015. Now with over 80 members from our vibrant bars and restaurants, the Portland Chapter of the USBG has established an impressive program mix of formal training sessions, special events, social gatherings, and educational outings – such as what we are able to provide them on The Maine Brew Bus. Our monthly Industry Education Tours for…

In order to let more people know about tours on The Maine Brew Bus, we like to bring our show on the road.  Every year we travel around New England and display at over two dozen beer festivals. People attending beer festivals have already traveled a bit to spend a little money and drink a lot of beer. These are definitely our kind of people! Our display at the recent Harvest on the Harbor Marketplace event in Portland. Our Wheel of Brew Trivia is an effective technique to get people to stop by to talk to us – even though we do not have any beer! The Wheel helps show our educational component to people. We work to convince guests to consider traveling to Portland, Maine for their next Beercation getaway. We also encourage them to check out our tours as…

A one-day snapshot looking at exactly where Maine Brew Bus guests travel from to visit Portland, Maine On Saturday January 2, 2016 we ran five different tours that visited 15 different producers. With 66 seats available on those different tours, we had reservations that filled 62 seats. That means we were 94% full on the second day of the year. Obviously this was part of a holiday weekend filled with revelry, but we were still impressed at our bookings this early in January. We were interested in learning more, so we took a closer look.  Here is the breakdown for that first Saturday: Massachusetts Maine New Hampshire Connecticut Georgia Rhode Island California Kentucky Pennsylvania Scotland, UK On this particular day, two entire full tours had zero guests who reported that the lived in Maine. Also, 55% of our guests were from…