By Matt Murphy
Beer Critic

Instead of reviewing a beer this week, I’ve decided to review the Great Lost Bear, a restaurant/bar in Portland. If you’re looking for the perfect location to get a genuine feel for Maine beer, this is your place. At most Lewiston bars, you may find one or two Maine beers on tap—usually a seasonal Gritty’s or Geary’s along with stock Shipyard ale. So while the well-worn qualities of Lewiston nightlife remain highly addictive, I recommend taking a breath of fresh air and a sip of fresh ale down in Portland. Right now, Lewiston feels like a rural barren Siberia, while Portland feels like Moscow: it’s still cold as all hell, but at least there’s a semi-refined feel to it.

The Great Lost Bear provides the cream of the microbrew crop with fifty beers on tap. Fifty beers on tap doesn’t guarantee a fantastic bar experience, but the Great Lost Bear manages to represent eighteen different beer styles, and all selections are top notch brews. If you want to get a feel for an Alt, Brown Ale, Export, ESB, Fruit, IPA, Lager, Red, Wheat, or Seasonal Ale all hailing from Maine, the Great Lost Bear serves up 5 oz. samples of beer for a dollar each. I stuck with beers from Maine brewers that I’ve tasted, such as Peraquid Ale from the Sheepscot brewery and Old English Ale from Andrews Brewery. Not all Maine microbreweries bottle their beer and the Great Lost Bear also offers cask-conditioned ales. If you’ve ever sampled a hand drawn pint in England, you have suckled from the proverbial cask-conditioned teat. The beer is served at room temperature and features what most consider apogee taste. I sampled some Old Thumper on cask and it tasted like a completely different beer.

The Great Lost Bear doesn’t just have a mouth-watering array of beer, but also has some divine food. After working up my appetite at the Maine rock gym about a mile away, I split some wings with my friends, ordered the Thai Chicken Noodle Soup, and devoured a Barbeque Burger. As one may surmise from my choices, the restaurant served eclectic pub fare. I’m sure the wings were the best I’ve tasted in Maine and the soup held its own after I added some salt and hot sauce. The burger was also first-rate, and with twenty different varieties to choose from, there’s literally a different burger for every carnivorous student at Bates. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice any vegetarian options on the menu: luckily, there’s always the vegan bar to fall back on! The Ninety-Nine restaurant wishes it served food of this golden caliber (but perhaps some of you prefer factory produced chicken spleen wings fried in pungent mule feces—I jest, of course).

In terms of décor, the Great Lost Bear falls somewhere between an epic Hemingway watering hole, replete with staggering yet strangely stoic characters and powerful guns, and a classic American dive bar, which shares many of the aforementioned features minus the stoicism. I especially liked the etched mirror displaying a forest hollow and an original Woodstock poster hanging near my table. The motif of the Great Bear was carried on throughout the pub, to my approval and praise. The Black bears of Maine are often buried under the rampant statewide Moose publicity, but you’ll not find a better mascot to embody pub ideals.

If you’ve got a serious interest in the impressive and interesting brews of Maine—well, my friend, you may have a second home on 540 Forest Ave. at The Great Lost Bear in Portland.




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