Raising a Can to Twenty Years
Two Families, Two Businesses, One Big Community
TOWN HILL—On a typical day at the Atlantic Brewing Company and Mainely Meat campus off the Knox Road, someone doesn’t yell, “Wait! There’s a bubble machine.”
No, actually, that might not be true. You never know exactly what might happen at the duo of family-owned and run local businesses.
On the parcel, lined with granite and trees, there’s a fenced-in playground, a tasting room, outdoor and indoor seating that’s modeled after a German beer garden. It’s a place where, if you pay attention, strange and beautiful moments often happen.
Sometimes those moments are fueled by barbecue or song or beer. Sometimes they happen in the middle of the annual belt sander race or during live music or just because there’s moments of joy due to the plenty of parking at the site nestled away from Bar Harbor’s hustling downtown. Sometimes those moments happen during an intentional celebration like the one on June 9 when the two businesses celebrated twenty years of working together.
“We’ve ben able to work together successfully and happily,” Alex Maffucci of Atlantic Brewing Company said Sunday. “Plenty of relationships don’t make it that long.”
Alex’s family began Atlantic Brewing in 1980 and for a long time, the brewery was located on Rodick Street in Bar Harbor. Alex began working there in 1998 when he was just 15. Doug Maffucci and his wife Barbara Maffucci brought the brewery from its start inside the Lompoc Cafe to Town Hill, at a 19th century farmstead. In 2009 they purchased Bar Harbor Brewing Company. In 2012 they began distributing out of state. Now, there’s another location in Bar Harbor on Cottage Street, opened in 2017.
Max Douglas’ family began Mainely Meat, which has also been in multiple locations. He’s in charge of the the Town Hill campus. Now, the men see the youngest and newest generations of their families play on the grounds where a new playground was dedicated on Sunday.
“It’s a hidden spot of Bar Harbor,” Maffucci said. “But it feels like you’ve left the town.”
The businesses have become a community within a community, and Town Hill has too. Marafucci likened it to a neighborhood within New York City, a place with its own connections and identity. Families see each other at the Downeast Horizons Walk or at the Town HIll Playground and now at MDI Community Market on Saturdays.
He gives a lot of the credit to Mainely Meat for building up that community feel that appeals to both locals and tourists.
There’s a plaque inside Mainely Meat’s bar for Les Foss, who died last year. Foss owned Island Towing & Auto Repair. He was the kind of man who hauled people out of snowbanks, brought totaled cars to their final resting places. He went to 1 a.m. accidents, cleared roadways, changed tires, fixed engines and would haul off your clunker when there were just no miles left. He was the man who got you out of a jam. He was the man who would chat to you about engines or the weather or motorcycles or trucks. He also hung out at Mainely Meat.
There are people, like Foss, who are regulars, who go to the restaurant three times a week in the summer. Paul Douglas said that last Memorial Day was Mainely Meat’s busiest ever when a musician who was playing there brought 70 family members who were up for a reunion. Like Les, everyone became a part of the Mainely Meat family that day.
Family and tradition are big parts of the success of the businesses, Maffucci says, even as he and Max Douglas try out their own new ideas.
“It’s great to see how Dougie and my uncle enjoy coming here and not just to put out fires,” Alex said. “They get to enjoy it.”
Alex said he and his wife Amy sometimes talk about what they’d do if they just pulled up stakes and started over and they always come back to the same thing. Whenever they do, they start laughing, he said. That’s because they’d always come back to a beer garden and that experience of community, friends, family, a place to socialize, play and ingest.
That philosophy was evident during Sunday’s anniversary event. As one girl sidled up to the face painter, she smiled. Nearby Marketing and Administration Manager Allie Sasner blew up balloons.
“Would you like stars or animals?” the artist asked.
“I’m a really big wolf fan,” the girl answered.
“Do you want a wolf on your cheek or do you want to be a wolf?”
“Oh,” her eyes lit up, “I want to be the wolf.”
That’s the kind of joy and agency that happens in big and little ways in both places. A lot of the time it’s intentional like when Amy Cameron Maffuci explained to people about the playground ribbon cutting that it was no longer a ribbon cutting but a ribbon run through.
“We thought that the kids would enjoy it more,” she said.
That’s the thing here, when Alex talked about relationships and lasting for two decades, that’s something that’s key in both businesses and in personalities: it’s an ability to listen, to see other people’s needs and wants, and an attempt to meet those needs joyfully. Sometimes that includes bubble machines and belt sander races and wolf faces. Sometimes that just includes barbecue and beer and hanging out with both new faces and regulars.
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