People who closely follow the brewing industry recognize Brienne Allan for a few reasons. She’s one of the most respected brewers working today, having played a significant role in making Lagers not just relevant, but cool, for lack of a better word. She’s also recognizable in a mostly homogeneous field: heavily tattooed like many industry peers, but a woman with a sharp tongue who’s been outspoken in an industry that hides its warts under layers of Carhartt.
Allan is best known, however, for her accidental ignition of the #MeToo movement of craft beer in 2021. But today, seated across from me with her baby in her lap in the main room of Sacred Profane Brewery and Tankpub, which she owns and operates with her husband Michael Fava, that’s not what she wants to talk about.
“I didn’t date brewers,” she laughs. She was the production manager at Notch in Salem, Massachusetts. Fava was the head brewer at Oxbow Brewing Co. in Maine. “I vetted him to every single person I knew in brewing to make sure he’s not a murderer or something and they were all telling me, ‘He’s literally the best person in New England, you’re going to be fine.’”
We’re all drinking 500 mL of the lighter of the Tankpub’s two options, called, simply, Pale. They’re recalling their first date and how, after his car was wrecked in an accident just days before, she was suddenly responsible for carting not only Fava around, but his PA system—the kind DJ’s employ to play music—as well. During his time at Oxbow, the charismatic brewer often took to the turntables under the nom de plume DJ Fava Le Chic.
“She was driving this little Fiat,” he says, “and I’m like, ‘How am I going to fit all of this in the car?’”
When Fava speaks, Allan pays full attention. When Allan speaks, Fava looks at her. It’s evident in their playful retelling of their first date that they adore one another. They both laugh at the memory while their young daughter gnaws on Allan’s tattooed fingers.
Allan survived that date, a mixture of time on a lake, pizza at Oxbow Brewing’s Oxford campus, and line dancing at the Maine Country Music Hall of Fame.
A lot has happened since then: A pandemic and a reckoning. Jobs left and a new business begun. A child.
The story of Sacred Profane Brewery and Tankpub begins with Allan and Fava, of course. On their own — with the help of mentors and friends — they earned industry respect for their beautifully crafted beers. Together in their humble Biddeford, Maine, digs, they’ve created a space that’s rooted in timelessness.
In hindsight, the dinners were a thing of wonder. Jackie Vonegosh, Mike’s mother, a single parent, could whip up the kind of big Italian family dinners often seen in Scorsese films.
“She was Wonder Woman,” says Fava.
In middle-class, blue-collar Wayne, New Jersey, home of hip-hop royalty Queen Latifah and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, Fava took in those meals with fascination and a sense of spectacle. He carried the conviviality and conversation of a big family dynamic that includes grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends, plus what it took to feed that family, into a blossoming career making beer, first for friends at parties in his off-campus apartment in West Philadelphia.
“Part of what drew me to brewing beer is that I was making this thing I can share,” Fava says.
“Part of what drew me to brewing beer is that I was making this thing I can share.”
He got his professional start at Philadelphia’s Dock Street Brewery, first as a salesman, but then as the youngest head brewer in America’s birthplace; which he considers the best beer city in the United States.
Fava soon met brewer Scott Morrison at Dock Street, who became his mentor.
“Mike asked all the right questions right away,” says Morrison, how now works as a consultant in the industry. “After a while in brewing, you get an idea of who could do it and who couldn’t. I was impressed. His work ethic was great, he was young, not afraid to work hard and do the dirty jobs.”
“[Scott’s] approach to beers and recipe writing was simplifying recipes,” says Fava. “It always stuck with me. It was the mentality of being a brewer, approaching how to make beer, how to not cut corners, simplify, and not overengineer.”
The two began working together building and decommissioning brew houses as a side hustle. They bonded over Belgian beers and became less student-teacher and more like friends.
“[Mike] is the easiest person to get along with,” Morrison says. “He works so hard, then he unapologetically goes out and has fun. He’s unique.”
Fava moved to Nodding Head and began writing recipes on a brew schedule that included—unlike Dock Street—Belgian, German, and English styles. When Nodding Head informed him the brewery wouldn’t be renewing its lease, Fava needed to look elsewhere.
“I’m the type of person who thinks when I’m doing something that I’m going to be doing that forever,” he says. “I thought I’d be in Philly forever.”
Then a young brewery owner from Maine who was looking to buy a brewhouse from Morrison walked into the warehouse.
Oxbow Brewing Company owner Tim Adams and Fava enjoyed some beers at famed Philly beer bar Monk's Cafe. Fava agreed to ride up to Newcastle, Maine, to check out the situation.
“It was the most beautiful, iconic Maine day,” he says. “It was the first week of May in 2012. Tim brought me to all these beautiful coastal places. It was like, wow, this is awesome.”
By July, Oxbow had its first head brewer.
Because it was “important to go somewhere where having input was welcome,” Fava says, he was given complete autonomy at Oxbow. He left his mark in beers like Loretta, a Grisette made with local grain; Luppolo, an Italian Pilsner; and Native/Wild, the 100% spontaneous Farmhouse Ale, which got Oxbow invited to The Night of Great Thirsts in Belgium as only the second brewery not from Belgium’s Senne Valley to be invited.
“I could have retired as a brewer then,” he says.
In Maine, Fava found that he was suddenly an industry veteran. In Philly, he had been the youngest head brewer in a historically strong beer market. In Maine’s nascent beer scene, he saw an energetic, growing community. He worked to grow Oxbow’s tiny farmhouse brewery to establish itself as a major player in the field of Farmhouse Ales in Maine and internationally. He socialized and made friends in the industry and beyond.
Beer travels across the globe scratched Fava’s “social itch,” and he was ready to do this in perpetuity, as always, but a trip to a Toronto beer and wine symposium introduced him to a new kind of forever.
Allan is an only child.
“Can you tell? No one is looking at me,” she asks, laughs, and sighs, playing into the stereotype of the only child needing to draw the spotlight on herself. “I always have to prove someone wrong.”
It’s up to interpretation who she may mean she’s proving wrong: former employers, keyboard warriors on beer websites, fellow brewers, or people she grew up with in the tiny town of Upton, Massachusetts.
“I hate talking about where I came from,” she says. “I don’t want to give them the satisfaction. But it plays a role in why I’m here.”
“I hate talking about where I came from. I don’t want to give them the satisfaction. But it plays a role in why I’m here.”
In high school, she was drawn to science and art, but “everyone pegged me as the art kid, so I wanted to prove them all wrong, which is the story of my life, so I went to pre-med at Emmanuel [College].”
Pre-med didn’t stick with Allan. Art is a calling, after all, and she found herself at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, on the North Shore in Massachusetts, where she studied sculpture and graffiti.
Allan also took to, as many college students do, drinking beer.
Her father worked as a salesperson for a beer distributor, and the two bonded over beers like Ruination and Enjoy By, both made by Stone in California. She was 21. He needed help at a beer festival, so she came along.
“I remember showing up in a dress,” she rolls her eyes. “It was my first [festival] and I thought you had to dress up for this shit. So fucking stupid.”
At the adjacent booth was a young brewery named Jack’s Abby Craft Lagers, which hired Allan almost on the spot when she met them at their Framingham digs shortly afterward. She spent the first year in the tasting room, but “hit a ceiling.” She began washing kegs and assisting on the packaging line. She felt undervalued and overworked, but that unhappiness was balanced by the relationship she built with Jack’s Abby manager Herb Lindtveit, who became the most important person in her brewing life to that point.
“Herb was my mentor,” she says. “I was glued to him. He’s the one who taught me everything about brewing. I don’t talk about him enough. He gave me a knife and soldered my name into it. I still have it.”
Eventually, she joined the brew team, where she worked the second shift, mostly alone. Despite the feeling of isolation, she felt as if she could get through every day so long as she could rely on Lindtveit.
“He was the most patient, understanding man,” she says. “You learned the most when you were with Herb. In a brewery, something breaks every fucking day. It was Herb’s whole job to keep the brewery going. I just followed him everywhere and learned how to do everything and fix everything. … He was the most honest and caring person in the beer industry. Herb gave me hope.”
In February 2019, Lindtveit died unexpectedly at the age of 46, leaving behind a wife and four children. For Allan, his death created a void and exacerbated a bitterness.
Allan had already left Jack’s Abby for Notch Brewing in Salem, Massachusetts, near where she went to college, when Lindtveit died. Chris Lohring, the founder and head brewer at Notch, became the “new Herb”: Someone older, excited to teach someone new things, and patient. Allan was a good student.
“She was always enthusiastic to try something new, something that was a deep dive, or something that would require a lot of effort,” says Lohring. “And she would do so without saying, 'This day is long or hard or what we’re doing is difficult to understand.’ Brienne was always open to trying. She was always all in. We bonded over that stuff.”
“Brienne was always open to trying. She was always all in. We bonded over that stuff.”
“I feel really lucky it was me [that Lohring taught],” she says. “I tell people I learned more about brewing in the first three weeks at Notch than I learned in my first five years [brewing beer].”
The two hit it off almost immediately, bonded by, according to Lohring, “a drive to make the best beer possible without compromise. Sometimes there wasn’t a universe or a home for that beer, but we knew that sometimes what we did was really special.”
“We’re like the same person,” she says. “We were equals. That was important to me.”
For a while, Notch, Jack’s Abby, and Bierstadt Lagerhaus in Denver were the lone lager-centric breweries in America. “Now they’re fucking everywhere,” Allan says.
It was Notch, though, that made Lagers “cool.” This genuinely stuns Allan.
“How?” she asks, then explains unintentionally. “When you’re drilling this esoteric shit down people’s throats, people start asking questions, researching, or start trying to copy it. The pictures we posted got a ton of people’s attention. Lukr faucets, videos of decoction or open fermentation. They overwhelmed people into asking what all these things were that no one else had.”
Amid the stranglehold hop-forward beers still have on the market, a Lager takeover is yet to materialize. But, as with Fava, the Lagers Allan made also took her places to study and talk: festivals, the Czech Republic, and, on the northwest banks of Lake Ontario, the city of Toronto.
The Pils & Love Festival—a bicoastal event jointly hosted by Oxbow and California’s Firestone Walker—showcases Pilsner beer from breweries across the world, from the two host breweries to industry darlings like Suarez Family Brewing, Russian River, and Bierstadt. In 2019, the event featured a collaborative beer between the participants, who all had input on the recipe and signed their names with a Sharpie onto a pallet at Oxbow.
“[Brienne] was the one brewer that I didn’t meet at Pils & Love,” says Fava of Allan despite her presence at the event.
Later, in Toronto, the two collaborated with Bellwoods Brewery, but a day apart. They even sat on a panel together, talking about Lager production.
“Hearing her talk about lager was intriguing to me,” he says. “She was talking about all the things that I wanted to do. I needed to talk to her. But after the panel, she disappeared.”
“She was talking about all the things that I wanted to do. I needed to talk to her. But after the panel, she disappeared.”
A week later, in Richmond, Virginia, at a beer event hosted by The Veil Brewing Co., Fava raced through a downpour from his cab to the safety of an awning outside a Mexican restaurant, where a pre-event dinner was taking place.
“I’m running from the cab, shirt over my head to protect me from the rain,” he remembers. “I find shelter, pull my shirt down, and the only person standing there is Brienne. It was very, very rom-com. I’m just trying to meet this person at this point. It’s not romantic. At this point it was weird we haven’t talked.”
That weekend, they hit it off over coffee and discussions about beer. One asked the other to meet up back in New England. There’s some debate over who did the asking.
Six months after the two took to the dance floor at the Maine Country Music Hall of Fame in Mechanic Falls on their first date, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world. Designated as essential workers, they were able to cross state lines to visit one another. Fava moved from Portland to the guest house behind Oxbow’s Newcastle brewery. Notch scaled back production significantly. Allan left Massachusetts and moved into the guest house.
“Newcastle is such a magical place,” Fava says. “We had 18 acres of beautiful Maine land. We were hiking every day. We were keeping trails, building bat houses, gardening, and raising 10 piglets. There was so much to do.”
The two brewers talked about their perfect brewery. The idea originated with just one beer: a Pale Lager. On Peak’s Island, off the coast of Maine, the two spent an afternoon dreaming of possibilities. Their conversation landed on the shrouded-in-mystery performing arts festival held there every fall: The Sacred and Profane.
There are certain words that will put you on the serious end of some side-eye from Allan at Sacred Profane.
“We don’t say ‘traditional’ here,” says Allan. “We don’t say ‘craft.’ We’re not a ‘craft brewery.’ We don’t make traditional lagers. Nothing about this is traditional to me. Nothing about this is Old World. I hate that people classify it as that.”
Certainly, don’t call the beer Czech.
“I have never said that we make Czech beer,” she says. “All of our ingredients are from the Czech Republic, but never once have we said that it is a Czech Lager or that we’re a Czech brewery. We never even talk about the Czech Republic at all. I never mention the Czech Republic when it comes to Sacred Profane.”
I wonder if she might use the words “inspired” or “influenced” instead. Sacred Profane beers are lagered in horizontal tanks, triple decocted and open-fermented.
“Not every brewery in the Czech Republic implements all these practices, but we think they’re equally worth it,” she says. “Nothing I’m doing here is copying what they’re doing in Czech. This is the way I want to do it to make a beer just as good as theirs.”
“Nothing I’m doing here is copying what they’re doing in Czech. This is the way I want to do it to make a beer just as good as theirs.”
It’s akin to reading a dozen self-help books and picking and choosing the ideas that speak best to your life. It’s that recipe that will make you a better person, or, in this case, brewer.
Allan says she’s softened a bit, but with a wry grin still says she “never bites her tongue.” Despite her anti-establishmentarianism, Allan is not an intimidating presence. She has dry humor, a quick wit, and laughs constantly. She’s prone to a pensive distant gaze when talking, mind and mouth working some convoluted thought trail, before centering herself back to the conversation with, “Yeah … I don’t know.”
Underneath her brash boldness and fearlessness when calling out other breweries is a core set of values. Right now, she’s focused on making beer that is unimpugnable.
“I’m trying to not argue with people,” she says. “From the beginning of this interview I’ve talked about proving people wrong or fighting the stigma about Lagers. I’m just so sick of fighting. So how can I make this [brand] so no one can say anything, so that no one can sit here and fight me on this? So when [people from message boards] come at me for no reason, it pisses me off because I tried to build this brand to be un-fightable.”
She hears every criticism, reads every message board post that questions the business plan, and feels every slight (perceived or real) with regard to Sacred Profane. But, I argue, those people who care about the beer industry enough to weigh in on social media and websites are going to be frustrated by the intentional vagueness. At this, there is a discernible glimmer in her eyes, as if to remind me that everything about Sacred Profane is intentional. Everything.
“There is as much or as little information as you want,” she says. “If you like beer-flavored beer, that’s great. This beer is for you. Or you could be the nerdiest beer person who thinks they know everything about every enzyme that converts in a mash kettle. Well then, this is the fucking beer for you. And then there is this whole range of beer drinker in between. That said, I don’t divulge a ton on social media, but no one asks me. If they ask, I’ll tell them, but they just sit there and … they’re trying to piss me off. I’m convinced.”
Fava fumbles, “We’re not targeting the …”
“He wants to say the C-word,” Brienne laughs, catching Fava’s almost-slip of “craft” in real time.
“We’re making beer,” he says. “We’re both professional career brewers. We’ve pursued beer for our lives. Maybe the attraction for people is that beer is supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be accessible. It’s not about pitting small new brewers versus industrial brewers who have been here forever. If someone is excited about beer, it’s a win for all of us.”
Biddeford is one of New England’s oldest communities, settled in the winter of 1616-17, four years before the Mayflower crashed into Plymouth Rock. The brick buildings that once housed the textile mills that gave birth to the American dreams of Irish, Albanian, and French-Canadian immigrants are now the homes of budding businesses.
Not far from the shorelines of the Saco River that those mills abutted, in a building that was once an automobile repair shop and, most recently, a butcher shop, is Sacred Profane Brewery and Tankpub.
It’s a small space with communal tables, a small kitchen, and plants from Allan and Fava’s home. Copper tanks hang from the ceiling above a small bar outfitted with just two Lukr faucets. The custom brewhouse is situated through a small door on the left marked “Brewery.” Sacred Profane has the capacity to make 1,400 barrels of beer (Allan and Fava are currently looking at production spaces to increase this) and is about a 60/40 split between packaged 12-packs and draft. The beer is available in five states: Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.
Inside the taproom, the prominently displayed tanks are the selling point.
“If you’re not using something for marketing purposes, why are you even doing it?” asks Allan, echoing something she claims she was told in the Czech Republic.
As has been much publicized, Sacred Profane offers just two beers: Dark and Pale. There’s an intentional duality in this. Without darkness, there cannot be light, and without the sacred, there cannot be the profane. Even the can design — sleek and simple; a black can, a white can — evinces this literal and figurative concept.
The resolve to offer just two beers impressed Morrison, Fava’s mentor.
“Doing two [beers] is really taking a chance,” he says. “They’re such great brewers. The quality is just going to exponentially go up because they’re making the same two beers better every time they brew it. They really are artisans. That word is so overused, but in this case, I think they are.”
“They really are artisans. That word is so overused, but in this case, I think they are.”
There are variations to order, including a mlíko pour (mostly foam), a layered pour, and a mix. Around Halloween, Allan sprinkled cinnamon sugar or coffee grounds into a bat- or pumpkin-shaped stencil to create art on the foam of Dark. An “Allen’s and Milk” is a mlíko pour with a shot of Allen’s Coffee Brandy, a spirit made in Maine. In the summer months, there’s a Shandy made with Pale and organic lemonade, garnished with a lime.
There are also rotating guest beers from reputable beer makers like Sierra Nevada and Brasserie D’Achouffe, as well as wine curated by the local wine store, Lorne, whose co-founders, Erin Sheehan and Carson James, also serve as Sacred Profane’s director of hospitality and director of food and beverage, respectively.
Since day one, the only thing that’s changed about the core beers has been the yeast. There are always extenuating factors that could bring an alteration to the beers, Allan and Fava agree; the cost of raw ingredients or palate changes among them. Regardless, Fava doesn’t believe a tweak in a recipe matters all that much.
“The beauty of these beers is that they’re very process driven,” he says. “It’s not just about the percentages of raw ingredients and making a recipe, it’s about how you execute the recipe on the brew day and in the cellar. The whole world knows what the recipe is; it’s about how to execute the recipe.”
He looks at Allan to continue, “Luckily, we have the best brewer I’ve ever met in my life right here.”
The two debated opening shop in Portland, where they live, but decided they didn’t want to be another tick on a tour of tasting rooms in Portland.
“We wanted to serve beer to a community,” Fava says. “Portland is great. We love Portland, but it’s very tourist driven. Even though we would have been able to differentiate ourselves, we wanted to be [in] a place where there weren’t so many breweries. Our beers are designed to drink a couple of, and the space we’ve built was designed to be a place you’ll spend all afternoon at or take your friends—and not be that pub crawl spot or a brewery tour afternoon.”
One of Biddeford’s selling points was the chance to create a community that didn’t exist: a place where local vendors, artists, musicians, and community members could feel welcomed. Allan and Fava also sought to create a taproom experience that didn’t exist, a rarity in the homogenized taproom culture.
“What I love about the place is that they have a unique point of view,” Lohring says. “You won’t forget them. You understand it’s different. You may love it, you may hate it. But you walk away knowing what it is. That’s powerful. When a place connects like that [to a consumer], you have them for a long, long time.”
“We want to be a place you want to come back to a couple times a week,” says Fava.
Not just for the duration of the latest, ahem, craft beer bubble. But forever.
“You’re going to be doing this one thing for the rest of your lives,” says Fava. “I read that winemakers only make 20 vintages in their career. It put my mindset into thinking of beer. Every batch is special. It is an opportunity to nail it, to perfect it. We only have a finite amount of batches to brew in this life.”
“We are creating a career,” Allan says. “This is our life. This isn’t a fad. Him and I get along so well, we follow it all the way through and we live by the same values. We have a business and a baby. We are stuck with one another.”
She squeezes the baby and kisses the top of her soft, brown hair.
“And we already made at least one perfect thing out of it.”
Words by Matt OsgoodPhotos by Mike Lianza
