Is This The Real Reason Mainers Are Obsessed With Allen’s Coffee Brandy?

There are only a few staples of Maine culture that don't melt with the snow or blow away with the leaves - Lobsters, fishing, calling people "bud," etc. One unofficial mainstay of our lives as Mainers, though, has to be Allen's Coffee Brandy. Hell, we're even finding it at the bottom of lakes in the middle of winter, for pete's sake.

However much of it we drink (and we apparently drink a LOT - roughly 85% of sales of the drink are made up here), no one really knows why we love it so much up here... Until now. This subject was recently tackled in an article on AtlasObscura.com, by author Dan Nosowitz, who raises some good points.

Nosowitz writes that Andrew Volk, who owns the Portland Hunt and Alpine Club downtown, says that according to Maine legend, fishermen would put Allen's in their coffee in the morning to help stay warm on the water. The love of the drink spread from there, and here we are all these years later, making time lapse videos of it, like the one below.

We can't condone drinking on the job, but we have to say it does sound like a good way to keep warm on Portland harbor at 3:00 or 4:00am... Juuust not while you're handling heavy machinery. They have those warnings for a reason, you know.

Nosowitz really digs deep into this issue in his full article, which you can read here. In the meantime, we'll spike your next coffee with some Allen's, bud!