What’s Brewing at Maybee
Paul Maybee, president and brewer at Maybee Brewing Company, is gearing up for a big beer weekend.
With the Fredericton Craft Beer Festival coming up on Saturday, breweries have been celebrating all things hoppy and perfecting their recipes to showcase at the yearly event that has come to be known as Beerfest.
Things are no different at Maybee. We caught up with Paul to see what’s in the works and what’s coming up next.
How have things been going lately?
We started last February. We opened our doors in February of 2016. We’ve been brewing here since November of 2015 so just over a year and a half now. Things are crazy. We right away went into the liquor stores so we could have our beer available across the province so that is still going really well and we’re just starting to meet face to face with people in other cities and starting to get more kegs. So we did it the opposite way most people do. We’re in 48 liquor stores.
Why did you choose to do it that way?
We want to have the opportunity to expand into exporting. That is one way where we see there’s the ability not just to serve the Fredericton community but also to be able to send beer into Nova Scotia and PEI and down into the New England states. Doing it this way gives us that opportunity to go into those markets.
We didn’t want to limit ourselves to get our beer as far as we can and the can is a perfect container for that. It’s lighter to ship.
What’s your latest release?
We actually do have three or four new beers that we just released or are about to. We have the five original beers, those are in the liquor stores. Work Horse IPA is our most popular beer.
Our most recent release, because this is beer week in Fredericton, is our beer de Mars. It’s called Mars Madness. This is a beer we specifically brewed for Beerfest (Fredericton Craft Beer Festival) so we’re going to have that on Saturday at the Beerfest. It’s a beer de Mars, which is a farmhouse saison style, more of a French beer de garde. It doesn’t have concrete guidelines saying this is what a beer de Mars has to be. It’s pretty loose. There are interpretations. It’s a historical style as well. It’s a March beer. It’s a fresh spring beer that’s been fermented cold over the winter. Beer de garde is beer for storing in your cellar and you wanted to cellar it over a long period of time. It’s usually a bit stronger and the beer de Mars I think is the beer de garde that we couldn’t wait to crack. So you drink it first thing in March. It’s usually a bit hoppier than a beer de garde and it’s got a fresh clean taste and a slight red colour.
Before that, we release our new double IPA Look Off, which is available in cans and on tap but it’s not going to be in the liquor stores just yet. It is in cans here at the brewery and on tap at a bunch of different places around the province and also the cans are available at Picaroons, Red Rover and Petit-Sault. That one is nine per cent and it features New Brunswick chinook hops from Moose Mountains. It’s a real nice, juicy IPA. We’re been getting great feedback on that. It’s the only beer that could possibly knock Work Horse out of my favourite beer spot. It’s really quite enjoyable. But you have to be careful not to drink it as if it is Work Horse because those two extra points make a big difference.
What’s coming up next?
We are working on a maple beer, which is seasonal. We’re still working on that one so I can’t say a whole lot about it yet because I don’t know much about it. We’re still working on the recipe. But there will be a maple beer and hopefully it will be within a month.