#Bevy drink full
That shining still is on full display through windows in the tasting room, where guests can enjoy tasting flights, craft cocktails, and oftentimes meals and snacks from a resident array of food trucks. Because it’s the heart of their operation, the couple named the still Hazel, after Mae’s maternal grandmother, who loved sombrero cocktails (a blend of vodka, coffee liqueur, and cream or milk) and convivial company. “We didn’t even have IKEA-style pictures.” Using Michael’s detail-oriented construction background, combined with the couple’s Yankee can-do mentality, they laid out all the pieces across the floor of the distillery, numbered them, and worked virtually with teams in Germany and Chicago to assemble the massive 2,000-liter still. “It was like getting a Ferrari disassembled,” Mae recalls with a laugh. Perhaps you can guess what comes next: A global pandemic shut down travel, so the experts who were supposed to assemble the still could not fly in from Germany.
The massive German distillation setup arrived in about a hundred pieces in early 2020, with no instructions. They even put together their sophisticated Kothe hybrid column still themselves, although that part was unplanned. Using the skills from their concrete business, the couple designed and built the distillery from scratch, with help from friends and family. It hasn’t been all tripping through forests and smelling the roses, though. “I don’t get to do it nearly as often as I would like because the seasons are limited, but to know that things we pulled from nature are actually going into our product feels really good.” “Foraging is definitely my happy place,” Mae says. Locally farmed sea kelp and sea salt give the couple’s Forij Slacktide Pine gin-named for that time of day when the tide is turning-an earthy, briny quality that melds beautifully with notes of hand-foraged white pine and juniper. The distillery’s retail outlet sells Maine-made products to enhance cocktails, like mixers from Vena’s Fizz House in Portland. Things like patronizing local businesses. to build a product from scratch in a way that supports the things we believe in,” Mae recalls. “We are both creators and makers, and wanted to get back to our roots.
And with the sale of their business, the time had arrived. Ever since college, when Mae won design awards for an alcohol brand she created for a class project, the pair had batted around the idea of mixing her marketing, design, and brand development expertise with his experience in project management, construction, and heavy equipment to build a craft spirit brand. When they sold that business in 2019, the Littlefields found themselves with a plot of land and a rare opportunity for reinvention. Before finding new life as Wild Bevy’s distillery and tasting room, it held a warehouse for the couple’s construction company, Polished Concrete Solutions. But that location, less than 45 minutes from the Massachusetts border, is just one more piece of the couple’s journey. Currently, as the business wends its way through myriad liquor laws, all of its products are available exclusively at the distillery, tucked somewhat incongruously between landscaping companies and auto body shops along an unlikely stretch of Route 9. That award-winning offering is part of a line that also includes a gin elevated with sea kelp, locally foraged white pine and juniper, as well as two bourbons and a vodka. “We got engaged there, and we take our kids there,” making it an ideal spot to forage ingredients for an incredibly personal business that turns out to also have mass appeal: Just out of the gate, Wild Bevy’s Tulsi Rose Gin took home a double gold in the 2022 New York World Wine and Spirits competition. “There’s a cluster of islands off the coast near us-we have been boating out there for years,” Mae explains.
And the couple knew exactly where to gather those blooms, which are considered invasive. The botanicals in that delicate gin include a healthy dose of wild-foraged rosa rugosa, the fragrant, bright-pink flowers that grow with abandon along the coast just a few miles from this stylish distillery. “We want people to experience the Maine we know with every sip: sunny summers at the beach, days spent building forts in the woods, and the fresh air at the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.”
But they wanted to skip the stereotypes-no whoopie pie, blueberry, or lobster anywhere. “Before we purchased equipment or started to build out the space, we knew we wanted to focus on botanical gins inspired by Maine,” says Mae of the Wells, Maine, distillery that opened in 2021.
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