SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — “If you grew up with a camp in northern Maine, it looked like this,” John LeGassey said in his soon-to-open tasting room.
A fire in the brick hearth. Rough-sawn wooden counters. Clean pine ceilings. Natural light streaming in. Plunked in South Portland’s thickly settled Cash Corner, this barn-like space is far from the backwoods of Katahdin.
But when Fore River Brewing Co. opens this month with an oatmeal milk stout, long months of blood, sweat and beers will be unleashed at last.
Since the spring, LeGassey and his two business partners, Alex Anastasoff and TJ Hansen, have worked around the clock converting a former salt storage shed into South Portland’s newest commercial brewery and tasting room. The space, created with salvaged materials that include 200-year-old bricks and wood milled from local trees, is a fitting setting for a modern Maine beer company.
“Growing up on a farm, you get used to saving what’s there,” Anastasoff, a Saco native and builder, said. “That ethic goes in at a really young age.”
Anastasoff used the 1,000-square-foot space to run his landscaping company, Lawn Enforcement Inc., until he sold the business 18 months ago. Ready for a career change, he decided to try his hand at running a brewery with his friend, homebrewer Hansen, and LeGassey. To do that he doubled the space. Together the trio crafted an environment to complement their traditional beers.
“Old barns are kind of comforting. You can walk into any old barn and feel like you belong there. It’s timeless,” Anastasoff, 40, said. “You can sit down and feel comfortable.’
The neo-rustic vibe is evident immediately when you pull into the drive.
Underneath sliding barn doors is the hint of a cobblestone path, made “to look like a wagon might come through,” Anastasoff said. But for years, salt trucks and ride-on lawn mowers were the only traffic. Before that, buses idled in this former garage at all hours of the day and night.
The tasting room used to be exterior mulch storage. Wooden post-and-beam construction around the bar resembles an old hayloft as a kind of canopy. A slice of silver maple is a bar top, sitting on a series of black birch logs weathered and stained.
“We were going for the appearance of an older barn and preparing for future expansion at the same time,” Anastasoff said.
Using a sawmill on site, they cut black birch, maple, pine and cedar. The wood used in the space is from trees grown in the area Anastasoff had in reserve.
To see where the beer is brewed, hop heads pass through a warm maple-framed archway. Fermentation tanks loom impressively where road salt was stored.
“We hauled out tons of concrete,” said Anastasoff, who with help from his partners dismantled a reinforced concrete wall. A section has remained.
“I don’t like to throw anything away,” Anastasoff said. From salvaged granite from the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge to wall sconces and chandeliers made of black iron pipe, even the chimney constructed with waterstruck bricks that date back 200 years, “we made every aspect,” he said.
Just like the old English-style hops in their stout and red ale, every ingredient matters. “I like the history of the brick. You can’t reproduce the same feel with new bricks,” Anastasoff said.
With beer tourists flocking to Maine in droves and outfits such as The Maine Brew Bus making it easy for visitors to get around, a brewery’s environment is increasingly associated with what’s in the glass. Both should be tasteful.
“We’ve had an explosion in new breweries around the state, which is good for tourism. People like to stop by a local brewery for a tasting before they go to a restaurant,” Joshua Reny, South Portland’s economic development director, said.
“What’s happening in Portland is spilling over.”
When people cross the Fore River to this less than glamorous locale, this brewery wants to be a destination. They’ve taken pains to make it so.
“We hand built all the lighting, sawed nearly every piece of wood in here on our saw mill and split the granite for our chimney,” LeGassey said. “I grew up in Medway in Penobscot County around lumber, so we’re pretty well used to using the tools to build what we were looking for.”
