 Welcome to the Maine course with me, Natalie Roth. Growing up in a small town in Minnesota, the only exciting cuisine was that of our state fair. Now that I'm in Maine, I am so excited to meet all the talented chefs that create such delicious and unique food. Come with me as I explore Maine and all the different foods it has to offer. The course with me, Natalie, we're here at Operay today and this beautiful building they have with Ryan and Sarah. How are you guys doing today? Great. I was wondering if we could just start off by asking how you guys came to be. You guys have this beautiful, gorgeous area. You know, how long have you been here? How did it start? My business partner, Mike and I are, I'll call it ski buddies and over the years had some conversations on the chairlift. He's not a big beer person. I am and have another business that's related to beer. So he's sort of complained that there's not enough cider in Maine for quite a while and we always had this long running joke of let's start a cider place. In the meantime, his family actually bought this building and they were looking to find a tenant for it. He thought a brewery would be an excellent fit. So we kind of tossed around who might come in, who would fit. Then COVID happened and our chairlift conversation got a little more serious to be, hey, why don't we do something? So from that turned into the real idea of let's do a business model around not just cider but hard seltzer was added as well. So we did it and we opened last July, a little later than anticipated but opened I think July 10th or so and have been going at it since. Dang, that sounds great though. I love when those casual conversations can turn into something like this. So could you tell me a little bit about the process of making your seltzers and your brews and everything? Is everything here done in-house? Or do you guys send it off, ship it in? What's the deal with that? So I can take this one. So we are technically a distillery and winery. We have a bifurcated process. We ferment our hard cider in-house. Similar process to beer. We take raw apple, must they call it, and then we add yeast in over the period of weeks and months. It ferments naturally on its own with a little bit of help and it turns into hard cider. Seltzer, because we are a distillery, we make it in a fundamentally different way than almost everybody else. Seltzer is often fermented sugar product. We're using real alcohol, real fruit, and it winds up being a really clean, really natural, really beautiful end result. What do you want to have? That's good. And yes, it is all made in this building behind the wall over there. Okay, wow, very interesting. And where do those inspirations for all the flavors? I mean you have that fridge stocked full. I was trying to read all the ones and I was just wondering if you guys thought of all those or if you guys take your inspiration from somewhere else? It's pretty collaborative. It's super collaborative. We have a really talented head of production who also comes from beer. And I think for us it's kind of like an exploratory process in food science. So I mean we take inspiration from everything. We really try to hone in our releases to seasonality using fresh ingredients when they're at their best and really try to release products when they are the most impactful. You know, so fall flavors in fall and you know, beautiful summer groups in summer. Some of it is inspired by classics. Right now we just released a product called Rainier which is a tart cherry and lime hard seltzer. Cherry and lime is a classic combo. It's super delicious. It's not one of our more like wild or necessarily creative flavors but it's a pairing that is timeless. And then, you know, conversely sometimes we get really experimental and one of my favorites is a product called Tangelo which is a tangerine grapefruit hybrid made with pink peppercorns. Which sounds wild but it is so good. I've never heard of pink peppercorns. I'll have to try it. Do you have a favorite? I have to ask now. That's actually one of them. Mine is probably Pine Ricky which is lemon lime pine and the pine is actually from Maine. We harvest it actually at my farm. Oh cool. There's a nice little local flair to that as well. So do you guys keep an eye on the sustainability part? Do you have a lot of your ingredients from around here or stay in Maine at least I hope? As much as possible. That's great. I think we think that the drinks would be less meaningful if it was all sourced from everywhere. So sustainability is important, local is important, fresh is important. Definitely. And I've heard that you guys kind of touch on this is a place that everybody can come to. You guys have this nice vibe going. There are places I hear that are made so that everybody can enjoy one. It's nothing too crazy that some places are and the city has. Yeah that was really important to us. In fact the name, Apre Apre however you'd like to pronounce it those are the only two allowed. Mike and I being ski buddies we really love that you know that after ski environment where everybody goes to the bar and it really doesn't matter who you are or what you're doing or anything in life you're happy and it's like you went on this little mini vacation without really going anywhere. Yeah definitely. It's like a staycation. Absolutely. The space should be egalitarian. Everybody should feel safe. Everybody should feel welcome. We wanted it to be comfortable and interesting and it really isn't for only folks who can afford the best of the best. It's for folks who want to try something new and have a nice time and maybe meet new people. Definitely. So speaking of you guys hold some events here that your bars painted pink. Could you tell me a little bit more about the efforts you guys are doing? You guys are holding a month long charity event it sounds like? Please. We are. From the beginning we always had a desire to involve the community and fundraising and whatever we can do to help. This month in particular we are doing a benefit for foundation for love which is an organization that helps patients going through cancer treatment in different ways. We've not just painted the bar pink but we did a special release flavor a raspberry black tea with a nice bright pink can and some logos and verbiage around what the foundation does so in addition to that that's bringing in money for them this month. We're also doing a what do we call it? We're doing an end cap silent auction to raise additional funds for this really wonderful nonprofit. They work with New England cancer specialists they give back to folks and really contribute to quality of life in some really trying times and in cancer treatment all of us. A month long initiative with an end party we're going to be sourcing items from our community and other like minded businesses and raising more money for these really wonderful folks to spend their time giving back as much as possible. That's super awesome to hear. The involvement in the community I think is very important and makes you guys unique almost and out a bit more. Where do you guys draw inspiration from that? How do you choose what charities to do how to fundraise and all that do you guys have a coordinator anything that helps? We do not have a coordinator I think for us please jump in I think for us we are passionate people and if we could get to everything at once we would try but for us I think it is about picking charities in a strategic fashion that allow us to give back as much as possible with kind of what's on our minds. So last April for Earth Day we partnered with Portland Trails you know Ryan's a skier I'm a skier, Mike is a skier conservation is hugely important to us the beauty of Maine is hugely important to us so we partnered with Portland Trails which is a non-profit that manages over 70 I think miles maybe acres of trail space in the greater Portland area. Wow. They're wonderful people and it's something that we wanted to do to raise money where we could so I think we take it on a case by case basis but for the most part it's what is meaningful and happening to us right now. Yeah but I think it's probably a local connection so we're more likely to fall in line with people we know or that are in the neighborhood or around here rather than a big national organization in some way. I think we get a little more out of it and the fact that they can actually come here and be a part of what's going on and help in those efforts as well. See where the effort and the money goes and you get to see the people who would impact and that's incredibly important to us. For sure, for sure. Well that's amazing I'm glad you guys are doing such great work I mean I really think it leaves an impact on Portland and helps you guys grow as a business. I was just wondering what do you guys seem to be wanting to do in the next few years so we started out sounds like you guys are pretty brand new but making your mark just as fast. Where do you think opera is going to go in the next few years? So we have a lot of hopes and desires it thankfully has been very successful so far so that is important to us sort of how do we you know keep this beautiful thing we've created here but also take that other places or you know whether that's the product going to other places or maybe mimicking this room in other places so both of those are certainly on the table and likely we've had great traction on not just the product but the experience of being here so I think we would like to really leverage that and go further with it. Do you guys have any of your product in grocery stores or anything around in Portland or can they only get it here? We do select amount of distribution in the Portland area for now but we do like to get out outdoors of people so we're looking really hard at the mountains this winter you know we think opera is designed to go in tandem with outdoor recreation and an active lifestyle wherever you go we want to go with you so even though we're only a year and a half old we are trying to grow sustainably organically we're keeping it select for now and we're realizing that we don't make enough product to suit the amount of folks who want it so we're in the process of scaling up our production as much as humanly possible in order to really iterate those goals but for now we're partnered with some really wonderful places in Portland folks who specialize in craft beverage RSVP has been wonderful Bow Street has been wonderful hilltop soup products so if you look you can find our product but if you're looking for every release this is the place to be I just wanted to touch on maybe if you could about a little bit of the food I hear that you guys have a meat and cheese plate but I also hear that you partner with food trucks so we carry high-end charcuterie options to make sure that folks can have something while they're here any given time we make it ourselves we carried our ingredients we really do love nice tasty things but because we're not a full kitchen we wind up partnering with Portland's talented diverse culinary scene a real privilege to be able to work with folks who are so good at what they do we've been fortunate you know we've had a real smorgasbord of everything you can imagine from sushi to tacos to Korean flavored Korean inspired tacos we pair with an Indian street food pop up from time to time it's been great and I actually think our guests, our customer base are more excited by the diversity than if we just did our own single thing yeah and Mike admittedly has a major passion for cheese plates so he makes some incredible best in the town I hear okay wow I have to try one myself I wanted to ask about the design of the space the space is beautifully curated with these amazing booths we were just talking about could you tell me a little bit more about who designed if you guys put your own personal touches in anything that I should be on the lookout for that maybe most people miss yeah so this look and feel was really important to us from the beginning I love we love brewery tasting rooms they're great I love hanging out at them but we wanted something a little bit different a little higher end but not crazy high end right so just a slightly different feel design wise we brought on Susie who was actually a high school very good friend of Mike's and had moved back to Maine and brought her in to help us kind of go through some design and some color choices and furniture choices and things like that to your other point of the question there are some cool things here so we actually repurposed quite a few things from this original building what you see now did not look like this it was kind of an ugly old plane industrial building it was a tuna can it was a tuna can yeah so the underside of the bar which we've painted pink for this month is actually siding that was on the front of the building our stalls in the bathrooms were actually made from the garage doors that were removed and repurposed to be bathroom stalls so there's a lot of that in the building we've done a lot of kind of reuse use some things that were just on the property honestly yeah that's super cool Mike for making something that was just a little bit glamorous a little bit more than what people were used to but making sure that the design was sustainable and true to the integrity of the building itself you know the ceiling is really as is the frame of the building except for the front here is untouched the floors are the floors that were here so the idea was to build upon an existing and already wonderful and unique structure what was the word we came up with industrial chic maybe industrial chic and industrial glamour we definitely done a successful job I mean I already want to curl up with a book you said we were talking about a raining hopefully you could hear it on the tin roof so I heard you guys have something secretive about your can as a little secret aspect to it do you mind showing us what that is so we don't want to let the cat out of the bag but I will say design has been a huge useful project so when we came out with our package product we wanted to make sure it was super minimalist really clean but if you look closely every release we do has a little bit of like a hidden marker as you know kind of denoting our subtlety I guess we will say yeah I think we won't let them know fully but if you look on every can you may find a little something different each time very cool thank you guys so much for talking to me today it was great to get to know you guys and to hear about this product wherever in the Portland main area makes you take opera with you on your winter adventures