Eat Maine #181

Kate McAleer:

The way that the business community has embraced me and helped me grow my business here in Maine has been just fantastic. And 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. And that's something I think unique to Maine.

Luke Davidson:

Whiskies are very regional. They're very specific to a region. So we use a Maine grain. We also use peat and seaweed from down East. So we're putting a really regional quality to our product and it's coveted in the whisky world to have uniqueness to it. We really feel like we're able to showcase that main quality to this product.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio show number 181, airing for the first time on Sunday, March 1, 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 adventures in specialty food and drink. Kate tickles our taste buds with tales of all natural chocolate bars while Luke describes how his company distills spirits from Maine grain. We promise to leave your mouth watering. Thank you for joining us. From the coast of Maine many sweet things come and one of these is chocolate. Today we have with us in the studio Kate McAleer who is the founder of Bixby and Company, 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 Co Op, Rosemont Market, Aurora Provisions, and Lois's Natural Marketplace. Kate, what a great job you have.

Kate McAleer:

It's very exciting and chocolaty and chocolatey,

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

which is, I think that's the best thing, is that you get to do things that make people happy. There's really nothing. Well, unless something went wrong with a batch, I guess there's really nothing that you could do that would present people with any sort of problematic conundrum in their life.

Kate McAleer:

Hopefully not. No.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Hopefully not. Well, I was interested to have you come in and talk to us today because you are in an article written by Sophie Nielsen from Maine Magazine called Maine Kind of 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 McAleer:

27, yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah. That's pretty young to be in charge of a good sized company.

Kate McAleer:

It's really exciting how I started this company when I was 23, turning 24. And 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, and if it doesn't work out, you still have your 30s to rebound. And that was a really incredibly powerful thing that she had told me at a pretty young age and had encouraged me to go sort of this completely non corporate path and learn everything about starting a company and then everything about chocolate from the ground up, literally from scratch. So it's been an incredible learning experience and growing experience for myself. And that was sort of the point in a way that, you know, it was about taking just a giant leap in risk and work really hard and learn a lot about myself and about business and food. And it's been an incredible experience. Challenging but exciting and fun and stressful all combined together.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I love that idea that, you know, your 20s are this very. There are times 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 right and you don't

Kate McAleer:

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 my mid-40s. Is it too late for me to become an entrepreneur? And that was a really interesting question to me. I'm not saying that you can't be an entrepreneur at any age, but there's a particular time in my life right now where I'm not really committed to anything but Bixby and company. So I can put 150% of all of my time and energy and 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 Belisle:

You have a connection to Maine that is lifelong?

Kate McAleer:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Although you've lived here for just the

Kate McAleer:

past two years full time, Right? Full time as a Mainer for the past two years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So tell me about what was that initial connection? Why did you start coming here?

Kate McAleer:

Sure. So my mom's family has roots in the Spruce Head, Rockland area. And my parents had bought a second home in the Rockport area before I was really even born. So we started coming here for not just the summer periods, but for Thanksgivings and winters and year round, you know, second home vacation experiences. And we'd always loved the foodie scene, the beautiful scenery. The breakwater is one of our favorite family walks with our dog. And my parents had retired two years ago when I was starting up this business. They had said, you know, we want to move to Maine full time. We think you should come with us. And I said, you know, 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 out, an amazing place to have a business. So the way that the business community has embraced me and helped me grow my business here in Maine has been just fantastic. And 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. And that's something I think unique to Maine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You had the opportunity pretty early on to share some of your work, we'll call it, with Cellar Door Winery.

Kate McAleer:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That must have been pretty important.

Kate McAleer:

Absolutely. I mean, Celador Winery is an example of a successful business, but also a successful woman owned business and a role model, quite frankly. So when I moved to Maine, I don't recall specifically, but I believe Celador Winery reached out to me before I even reached out to them. And they said, you know, can you drop us off samples of your product? And I ran over there and did a sampling and they opened up some wine and we were already pairing which bars would go with which of their wines. And then they invited me to come and do samplings, which are incredible experiences at the winery in Lincolnville. And so many fascinating people walk through that location in Lincolnville. And some of, you know, my biggest networking for business opportunities actually occurred at Cellar Door Winery. And again, you have to be open to doing these things. But then things come together unexpectedly and in an exciting fashion.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You originally weren't going to focus on chocolate. You weren't going to focus on really 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. And then you began graduate work at the New School, studying the history of decorative arts and design.

Kate McAleer:

Yep.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So there's a lot of interesting.

Kate McAleer:

Yeah, so I like to call myself a fan of cultural history. So be it through objects, art or, you know, history, history and studying abroad. So 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. And 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 interests. What could be, you know, this one thing that would tie it together. I was pursuing, you know, an art history, decorative arts career and then decided to just take a total pivot. And some of my friends called it a quarter life crisis. But I think it was just, you know, you start going down something and you realize, okay, this is really interesting. And I, you know, it's intellectually interesting, but it's not going to be enough to fulfill everything that I'm looking for in terms a full time, impassioned career effort. So 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 through 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, and then chocolate, as a lifelong chocolate lover and then having been exposed to chocolate in France, you know, there's. The French are. They're very opinionated and they have a lot of opinions that Americans don't know what real chocolate is or they don't know how to even eat properly and all these stereotypes about Americans. And so I learned a lot about what it means to eat good food and appreciate good food in France. And then that translated into eventually the launching of Bixby and Company.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And what about this whole cultural element of chocolate? What about. I mean, you had an interest in the history of decorative arts and design. Was there anything interesting to you as far as the historical aspects of chocolate?

Kate McAleer:

Sure. So chocolate's a superfood. It comes from the cacao bean, which is grown along the equator, and it's literally fruits from the cacao trees that are pried open with machetes, and these little cocoons of mushy white stuff are taken out, and then the beans are inside of those little cocoons, and then they're fermented in the sun, and then they're broken down. What becomes what we know as chocolate. So it's a superfood, number one, full of antioxidants and interesting properties. It has an amazing history, just in terms of the very first chocolate. People drank it as opposed to eating it. And it's had a really interesting history, not only in Europe, but also the American role of developing what became chocolate candy. So it was a fascinating ingredient, and also it's an interesting chemistry process. So chocolate is full of cocoa butter, which is the fat from the cacao bean. And cocoa butter is a polymorphic substance. So these different fat crystals form because of cocoa butter. And so the art of chocolate making is really the art of tempering, which is forming the correct crystals. So there's 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 stage snap and taste. So just the art of mastering tempering of chocolate was an extreme challenge at first and something that I'm still becoming a master of. But. So 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. So learned about that in pastry school and then really dove into it. How do you make chocolate? How do you make real chocolate?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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Dr. Lisa Belisle:

well, tell me about your decision to go to pastry school. I mean, that's a very specific thing that one would choose to do and in her 20s.

Kate McAleer:

Yep. So when I decided to leave the art history path that I was sort of headed down, started brainstorming about what type of business I would want to run because I had decided I wanted to run my own business and 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. And so instead of returning to graduate school, I did a six month pastry program in New York City, dove into that. So in pastry school they have different sections like baking, cake making, then there's chocolate. And the chocolate section was for one week. I became very enamored with it. It was very challenging and difficult and a lot of my other fellow students just said, I'm never going to work with chocolate. And I decided to pursue it full bore. And so 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 how do you make food? It's not even how do you make food on a larger scale either. So there was a big level of, okay, I have training, but how do I translate that into scaling up? And one of the resources in Maine that's been Incredible. To help with that as an example is main manufacturing extension partnership. It's this group of, I call them consultant experts that help you scale up your production facilities and help you figure out what types of equipment you need to help increase your batch sizes, et cetera. So there's those types of transitions from just being strictly artisanal pastry chef to becoming a larger producer.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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 or the right connections to. To do as you've described. Scale up. So business that it is its own thing and it's got a very specific set of skills that you wouldn't necessarily have from just focusing on the product itself.

Kate McAleer:

Correct.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do your parents have background that might have been helpful to you? I know that your mother was in the healthcare administration, I'll call it industry. And they've both been working with you on your product since you moved to Maine. What has their, I guess, presence meant to you as you worked on this?

Kate McAleer:

It's been critical from just a personal and then business point of view. So they've been incredibly supportive on 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. So 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. And then just through some of my other certification agencies. Attended various webinars or conferences, just trying to gleam as much as I can about. I mean, so there's general business knowledge, but then, you know, the food industry is actually very complex, far more complex than I ever knew it to be. So there's, you know, people who make the products, but then there's this whole supply chain of most products out there. I should just qualify. Don't make the products themselves. They're really brands that have it made by manufacturers or co. Manufacturers and then it goes into distributors and then it goes onto retail shelves. We're actually the manufacturer. Right. We make the product, we ship the product and then it goes through distribution into. Onto retail shelves. And so That's a very complex chain of interactions that is not obvious to. It was not obvious to me before getting into the business and 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. And both my parents didn't have any background in that either. But we all, you know, 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 help as possible so that you can navigate those complexities in a more potentially smoother fashion. Other small manufacturing companies are some of my best friends now, and they make, you know, amazing products. But then we also talk about, you know, the complexities of shipping or freight or, you know, barcodes, etc.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's really interesting for me to hear you talking about this, because I think you're right. I mean, 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.

Kate McAleer:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So 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 McAleer:

Absolutely. And I love to ask questions, so I'm not afraid of asking questions. And I think some of the people I've interacted with in the industry think it's funny how many questions I have, and sometimes they don't even have answers. So, yeah, it's very complex, and 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 were to open your own store, that would be direct to the customers and a much different interaction of how your product gets into hands of customers. But, I mean, my very first customer was Whole Foods Market, and I had this dream of being in Whole Foods. So one of the NYU dorms has a Whole Foods Market in it. And so I had been shopping in Whole Foods, observing Whole Foods. And so I kind of developed this relationship with Whole Foods and then 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. But certainly, you know, I think the key was networking with other people to help you navigate the complexities.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And as you're doing this, you're simultaneously continuing to develop great tasting chocolate bars.

Kate McAleer:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Which is probably even more important to your goal.

Kate McAleer:

Yeah, well, you know, the very first order with Whole Foods made entirely by hand. Every single bit of it was handmade, hand wrapped, hand packaged. And in the past just six months, we've had an incredible infusion of some much needed equipment to help us with the production of things. So I won the Gorham Savings Bank LaunchPad $30,000 cash prize. One of the very few food companies to actually win a prize. Most, most of those funds typically go to tech companies. So 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 vats 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. So we had this constant issue of just not enough liquid chocolate, as I call it. And so the Gorham Savings Bank Launchpad melters were just an amazing addition to our little factory. And then I received a loan from Whole Foods Market and purchased a wrapping machine which we fondly call Bix the Dragon. You have to keep feeding it bars so it stays happy. And so going from hand wrapping, which used to take days, to machine wrapping was just a huge improvement on not only my time in the factory and other people's time in the factory, but just efficiency wise, it was like an 1800% improvement and 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 six 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 we would have done because the production that we've been doing over the past six months has just been incredible compared to when we were planning for it. So it all worked out and all came together in time for just a big increase in demand.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How many bars are you selling on a regular basis?

Kate McAleer:

Well, we're making anywhere from three to five thousand bars a day and then selling them across the country into natural food stores and natural, like co ops, grocery stores, those types of outlets, as well as online. More and more people are caring about natural foods and natural products and it doesn't necessarily have to just be in natural food stores, Right. Like, could it be at airports or could it be at, you know, on trains or I'm just giving examples of just other even golf courses. Right. More outlets for the products so that they, so more people can have access to Bixby bars, which is healthier candy or healthier chocolate. And yeah, plans are, I hope to, you know, expand our, our factory in the future in Rockland and continue to grow our production abilities. And I think another personal goal is play more golf. Get out there. And when you start up a business, you make a lot of personal sacrifices to your, not only your hobbies, but just personal time in general. So I think trying to claim a little bit of that back from chocolate so I can go play golf instead of make chocolate would be good for me in the future.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Kate, how do people find out about Bixby and Company?

Kate McAleer:

Sure. So 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. So all sorts of outlets on which you can find us or, you know, in your local health food store or co op. You can hopefully find Bixby bars there.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And 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 is as passionate as you are, clearly about not only what you're producing, but also just sort of the process of producing and being in the world. It's wonderful to spend time with someone who is as enthusiastic as one could possibly be about life. So I appreciate your coming in. We've been talking with Kate McAleer. She is the founder of Bixby and Company, a chocolate making company that uses organic, wholesome ingredients located on the water in Rockland. Available nationally and locally and I'm certain, internationally at some point. So thanks so much for coming in.

Kate McAleer:

Oh, thank you for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marcy 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 Marcy.

[Unidentified voice]:

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 Marcie Booth. Let's talk about the changes you need. Boothmaine.com

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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 was 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 had 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 Davidson:

Thank you for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's interesting that your dream was to bring these very kind of 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 Davidson:

Well, it's, 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 or other things. And there's always been a close tie to that. And it was a way for me to do both. I mean, to be sort of involved in the food community and also in a real main sort of agriculture community. It was fun to be able to try to put those together. And there's also a lot of sort 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 Belisle:

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 Davidson:

Sure. So my parents were involved in the or sort of drawn to the whole back to the land movement of the late 60s, the nearing movement and that and the Good Life, a book that inspired them both. And they moved to Maine and during that time and they settled in a community that was very much old school Maine. It was a beautiful bucolic sort of stone walls and fields that were still full of, you know, hay instead of trees. And it was a really neat place. A lot of people were doing the same thing like minded at that time. And they were hippies and they were back to the landers. And my parents were kind of in between there. I'd say they were short haired hippies maybe was the way to look at them. But. And they. So we had a big community of the back to the land folks for sure. And there was a lot of pickup softball games in the summer in potlucks. And you know, the Belfast Co Op was definitely a big piece of our life in that time. And you know, so that was in Jefferson. And from Jefferson, Washington, Unity up into, you know, Camden was a very enclave of this movement and 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. And we had. In our little community, we had probably six or seven old family farms that were still in existence with an old barn out back and barely any running water. And in fact, we were the only ones that had hot water on our road. And our road was a little dirt road out to nowhere. And it was really, really an interesting time. I mean there was a lot of. It wasn't an easy thing for sure. And definitely like most of the people that were drawn to that time, a lot of them left or sort of found other ways to move. They stopped heating with wood and whatever and moved into easier times. But. And even the people that lived there did the same thing. And that's what was interesting to me is to watch that change is I grew up and moved on and come back to visit and actually both my parents have moved from that area as well. But a lot of that sort of simple and interesting life had disappeared. And you know, sort of the farms fell down. And I was always looking at why that happened. I was trying to figure out in some way to see where that. Where that piece fell apart. And a lot of things happened. I think large box stores and sort of inexpensive food came in. It was hard too. And it was a Hard lifestyle and it was easier ways came about, people were drawn to them and that makes sense too. But a lot of that whole piece sort of disappeared. But what's been really fun is to watch it come back actually in a different way, but very earnest and solid as the. Obviously Mafka is a big scene now in a good way. And there's a lot of the local food and it's actually. I don't know that it ever died for sure, but it came. It's really the rebirth of it has come and it's really exciting to be a part of that. And as I saw that activation and my father especially still is involved in that piece. He lives in Brooks now and he's full of a lot of that still. And so I've been able to watch, you know, sort of see him be continuous with it. And then I've watched it come through in a new way, in a youthful way and want to be a part of that again. And originally I had looked at. So I was a carpenter throughout this process and built houses and barns and things. And I lived out of the state and came back with my wife 18 years ago. And it's very hard work and it's not always prevalent in Maine. And making a living in Maine, especially outside of Portland, is not an easy thing. So I was always looking at different things. My wife and I tried farming for sure and we had a milk delivery business for a while and with other things like foods and whatnot, local foods and things. And the Great Recession put a nail in that coffin, but kept looking at other avenues and one was to malting grains because Maine has a lot of grain grown in the state and it's not really that well known. And a lot of it is a secondary crop to potatoes. The potato farmers are finding that it's profitable and actually desirable, their grains. And so they're starting to really build that piece up. But I was looking at ways of. There aren't any malthouses 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 it closely, I'd worked with CEI and some other organizations around that and some business planning. And there wasn't a lot of margin in it, a very, very small margin. And as you look further down the line, you see it being the value added comes later, much later in either in a beer or whiskey, let's say. And 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 sort of lifestyle. Like we were talking earlier about that whole sort of mystique of Maine and the character of Maine and it's got a national sort of draw. And I saw that as a good way to turn to actually add value to even more to what I wanted to do. And it's a very similar climate and even kind of people to the Scottish realm. And the type of whiskey we make is a very Scottish style whiskey. So kind of boiled that all up and distilled it. And here we are, having read the

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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. So 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 Davidson:

It's very exciting to be a part of that. And actually that piece, exactly like you said, watching the simplicity turn into sort of hardship has been an interesting place. And so people are drawn to the simplicity, but the hardship is definitely. But they're drawn to the bigger story for sure. And to be able to pull pieces from that and apply them to sort of making it a little bit easier and still being able to experience that story and lore, it's definitely been a big response. And I think that's a big piece of what is making us interesting to people is that we are genuinely not in some sort of propped up or facade type way. We're actually applying a lot of those sort of pieces of Maine that people are enjoy and are making something really neat with it. And it's exactly right. Though your point is interesting. I think everyone's drawn to that simple life and that the book was very much an example of that. And everybody, my wife and I included as you, we jumped in very deep into that spot. And I had grown up with it, but. And actually it was a very similar process because I watched my parents do the same thing. At the time I didn't really know it, but now I look back after having experienced it myself, you just wear out, like you say, particularly now, where you actually have to have a life 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 Belisle:

Yes. You were talking to me about your children who are both in high school now, and they enjoy living. You live in Freeport, so they enjoy some aspects of sort 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 main people. So that really is sort of 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 Davidson:

It's for sure a piece of that that I've always sort of carried with me is that I love. What I've been most drawn to in the main story is there's a Yankee can do quality to a lot of Mainers and, you know, the silk purse out of a sowsier kind of thing. And there's a lot of pride around that. And it's definitely a piece that I've taken from some of the people that I grew up with and have seen sort of make literally, you know, vehicles out of seven different vehicles and things like that sort of drawn to that place. But it is also there's some sort of a provincial quality that is not entirely enjoyable or easy to live in. And so we've definitely taken a silk purse in terms of. Or a sow's ear, I should say, and trying to make a silk purse out of it in our little life in Freeport, for sure. And keeping the more, you know, like you just said, sort of 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 them exposed to some of the interesting points of what I think is important, which is A, hard work and B, sort of understanding the world around you and being a part of the bigger picture in the system of farming and agriculture and life systems and things like that. So it's been really fun. Definitely have been ups and downs in that process. And 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 cell phone.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I have two currently I have two teenagers and a 21 year old. So I feel for you because I think that we all struggle that, but it's also, you know, knowing having interviewed your father for the radio show and he goes by a different name, Surya Chandra Das. Surya Chandra Das. And he also is in features in Maine magazine. So he took a different path entirely. And what's nice for me to see is that you, you totally respect that, you know, he has a different life that he's chosen. You value that. You, you know, give him credit for that. You're choosing this life and, you know, you're trying to figure it out and being authentic yourself. But also as your children are growing up, you're giving them the space to try to understand how they fit everything together as well.

Luke Davidson:

It's actually I hadn't sort of put that all together until right now. It's sort of a neat thought. Yeah, it's been, I will say that in that pursuit, you know, a lot of this genesis is definitely in my parents pursuit and their exposure for me of that time and their excitement about it definitely affected me in a good way. And to watch my father move through his life and still maintain a lot of that in his path, exactly as you said, it's been helpful to watch him make his path and his activation and, and support from mine has been really nice too to watch. So we all have taken something from that is what I'm trying to say. And yeah, now I can only hope that mine to my children would be in the similar vein and they're definitely excited about what we're doing and there's a lot of, lot of fun in our space, even though it is spirits and you know, something that my children aren't actually enjoying right now. There's a culture and a community that's being developed that they've definitely feel and you know, right down to the very simple things like my son will help break the grain or my daughter will help wash dishes or whatnot in the distillery. But my son plays music and he's always contributing to any kind of event we have in that way. And so there's been a lot of, you know, family, community around this and then the bigger picture community. And the most, for me, the most rewarding thing that's been happening is the community that's supporting us. And what we're doing has been really, really helpful and exciting and we're feeling it in all kinds of ways right now.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

so I know that you wanted to make whiskey and that's what your main that's what your product is. Tell me a little bit about that product itself.

Luke Davidson:

My original goal and sort of I'd say dream or desire was to make a whiskey because I'm drawn to that. I like the the story of whiskey. I like actually the product of whiskey. And I think there's a lot of it's a great way to illustrate a region. So it's like a terroir concept in wine especially, but now it's coming through in the food world. Whiskeys are very regional and much like cheeses and like I say, wines and all that. And they, they're very specific to a region. And that's why I really was drawn to the whiskey piece because we could really apply a region to a product. And in our whiskey, for example, we use main grain that we floor malt on premise, which is very rare. There's only five other distilleries in the country that do it. They still do it a fair amount in Scotland. And that's really a process of allowing the grains to be to activate the grain a little bit, to allow some of the enzymes to come out. That makes it usable for us to convert the starch and the grain to sugar. It can be done on a very it is done on a really large scale out in the Midwest and in Canada, but on a small scale for the farmers that we use here locally, it's hard to get that kind of specific grain. And also when you do it on premise and in a small scale, it changes the grain in a different way and makes it very, very regional, we found. So we also so we use a main 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 at a certain time. So we have to bring in other grains. And the product is definitely different. And so we do. 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 peat and seaweed from down east and we smoke some of the grains and apply that flavor to it as well. So we're putting a really regional quality to our product. And that's what the whiskey piece, it's coveted in the whiskey world to have uniqueness to it. And we really feel like we're able to showcase that main quality to this product. And that was my original draw, was the whole a. The lore and sort of mystique around whiskey. And it sort of felt very parallel to the main story that I was trying to tell. And it was a great way to showcase that product. But the problem with whiskey is that it takes a long time to age and you put it in a barrel and let it sit. And so you have all this capital sitting on a shelf somewhere, a rack, and you need to do something else while your rent checks, bills keep coming in and insurances and all that. So we, you know, we kind of, we knew that, but it was. It became very, very clear that that was something we needed to not have on the shelf. So. Or we could leave that on the shelf. We had to figure something else out. And so we started to make some other products and we call ourselves a farm to flask distillery. So we were looking at other things that, that were fermentable or made a good sort of spirit product and that could go to market much faster than what we wanted to do with the whiskey. So we came up with a few different products that were definitely not whiskey and much more sort of readily available or put on the shelf of it quickly kind of product. And it kind of snowballed and we got excited about it, I'll confess. And we sort of had a couple new ideas. We kept coming out some other stuff. And so now we have nine products and they're all being received really well and they're all unique. That's the best part and the part that's really exciting is we use main grain for all of them and we formal only the whiskey grain. We have found a supplier that does segregate the main grain that one of the malt houses does in Canada and sells it Back to us in Maine, but 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. So we're really adding Maine Maine mane to this whole thing and really playing that story out. And it's coming together really well. And all the products are very unique, and we feel that that is because of the regional quality of them.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What I'm struck by, and 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 kind of sit on the shelf. So how did you gather all of these skills and all of this knowledge? Is it something that you just came along?

Luke Davidson:

In some ways, yes, I will say that. Well, I definitely was just. I wouldn't say just a carpenter, but I mean, I was a carpenter with a small crew that built houses prior to this. I've always had sort of. I've been drawn to the concept of marketing and design and things like that. And I'm an artist on the side in a lot of ways. Just sort of closet artist in some ways, or just, you know, drawing and painting at home kind of thing. And I originally was a furniture maker, early days. And so I've always had that sort of maker sort of piece in me. And I guess lots of things happened is that once you realize how expensive all those things are, and applying the Yankee can do quality, that sort of is in me. I decided or found that I needed to. We needed to do something to get the stuff noticed, and it just became snowballed. We learned a little bit as we went and built upon the ideas of marketing. Very early days, actually. Kemp Goldberg was really, really kind. One of my partners is friends with them, and we were able to do some really nice early work with them in town, these great marketing firm in town. So they gave me some ideas to step out with. And then we kind of snowballed, built on that. And I found a great designer in town, Scott Whitehouse, who is an amazing designer, graphic designer. And so we've kind of made our. We have a still at work called the Franken still, which is a bunch of different parts from the food industry that we've welded together and made a really usable and really wonderful still. Because actually, that's another piece in the same vein is that that equipment is scarily expensive. And so Instead of spending $480,000 on a still, we spent nine, and we welded it together ourselves. And it's a wonderful still. Much to the same avenue. We took a lot of marketing ideas and sort of frankenized them and made our own little story. If you come by the distillery, you'll see that it's not very polished, but it tells a story for sure. And there's a lot going on in the space. There's a lot of story being told just in the space. So it was a matter of need that we came up with our design. That's where I learned a lot of it is need, panic almost sometimes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think it's very interesting that you. That distilling, you know, just transforming some. Creating something from a variety of things has become your life's work in many different ways. You know, in the. In the distilling ideas, distilling spirits. And this is. I do think that there's a main aspect to that, but I also wonder if there isn't even a generational aspect to it. I see a lot of people in our generation who have taken some of the great things, and 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 Davidson:

Well, I think that's the purpose of. Well, it gives meaning to what we do. I mean, without some tie to our history and some betterment of it, I think that we kind of lose sense of purpose. And I think there's a lot of that problem. It's not just modern times. It's probably always been that way. But without building upon what we have from our past, let's say, or our community or around us, a lot of people lose sense of purpose. And it feels like. And I definitely feel like I'm gaining a sense of purpose by that combining of those things. And I think that's why people are drawn to this. Our story, is that there is some of that happening. There is that. And I definitely. 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, you know, learning involved in that. But it is not the most exciting part of our process, for sure. Basically, it's a waiting process. We basically are, in essence, boiling water in some ways. I mean, that's not really what we're doing, but that's sort of the same process and it can take nine hours to do that. And we have, you know, I have some great help now, people that really are support 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. And that's another thing that's really important that we really want people to know about. What we're doing is we're not making an alcohol delivery system here. We're applying a region and a quality of a product. It's a cultural piece. It's not we want people to enjoy this and not actually we aren't even marketing it as something that you have a lot of. It's not something that we're interested in being. And so it's more about the story and like you say, the distilling of many things. You know, an experience, a piece of a community and a region. That's really what we're pushing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Luke I encourage people to go to Maine Magazine and to read the article about Maine Craft distilling and I know that they're going to want to learn more about the work that you're doing. Do you have a website?

Luke Davidson:

We do maincraftdistilling.com so if you're listening

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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 with you today.

Luke Davidson:

Thank you for making this fun.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to Love Maine radio show number 181, Eat Maine. Our guests have included Kate McAleer and Luke Davidson. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on itunes. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of lovemain Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Eat Maine show. Look forward to our conversations next week with Anna Lair and Deborah Heffernan, both of whom have survived heart transplants. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Sam.

Luke Davidson:

Sa.