Platner Is Out. Maine Brewing Co.’s Owner Wants In. Would You Vote for Senator Lunch?
For the past month, as the high drama of the World Cup has kept sports fans glued to their televisions and smartphone screens, politicos and news junkies have been enthralled by a much lower drama unfolding in Maine. With the battle for one of the state’s seats in the United States Senate well underway, a star player has been sent off the pitch. Now, one of the sides is scrambling for a super sub.
Maine Beer Company’s co-owner wants to be it.
If you’ve remained blissfully ignorant to the electoral mayhem in Maine… well, congratulations, that sounds delightful. But given it has a beer angle, say goodbye to that bliss and let’s get into it.
Last weekend, the Maine Democratic Party’s duly nominated candidate for Senate, Graham Platner, withdrew from the race in the face of new, credible accusations of rape. Scandals had dogged the self-styled populist outsider nearly from the jump, and I don’t really care to litigate them all here. For our purposes, the important thing to know is that in the fight to depose longtime Republican incumbent and liberal bête noire Susan Collins, Platner is out, and 49-year-old Dan Kleban wants in.
“I’ve been overwhelmed by the countless calls from Mainers encouraging me to consider this race,” he wrote in a brief newsletter on July 8 announcing his intent to throw his hat in the ring to pick up Platner’s mantle. “I’m ready to fight for Mainers and bring a new generation of leadership to Washington. I believe I can unite our party and finally defeat Susan Collins in November.”
Neither Kleban nor Maine Beer Co. (MBC) responded to multiple requests for comment.
In 2009, Kleban and his brother, David, opened MBC’s doors in Portland for the first time. Since then, it has grown a lot, and moved a little: It is now headquartered in Freeport, a tony suburb best known as the home of L.L. Bean. Its beers are well made and well known to East Coast drinkers; after over 1.2 million reviews, its portfolio has still managed to maintain four bottlecaps out of five on Untappd, a platform infamously capricious about consistency and quality. (I will still buy Lunch, MBC’s 7 percent alcohol-by-volume India Pale Ale, basically anytime I can lay my hands on it.) In 2025, the Brewers Association reported that the firm produced 45,210 barrels of beer; it has grown by about 5,000 barrels each year since the pandemic. The BA’s data hasn’t exactly proven reliable this year, but directionally speaking, MBC is your classic mid-sized regional craft brewer. As it happens, it also boasts a slogan — ”Do What’s Right” — that seems like it could have been written to be emblazoned on campaign lawn signs.
Kleban was actually in the race for a hot second last year, launching his own campaign in September 2025 after he’d reportedly already delayed it for months at that point after a veiled threat to stay on the sidelines from the Democratic powers that be in Washington, D.C. Platner’s wildly successful barnstorming in the early Democratic primary made it clear that it wasn’t Lunch time, and that any serious challenger would need serious institutional backing. The Peeper purveyor quickly withdrew his candidacy and threw his support to Gov. Janet Mills when she entered the fray in October at Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s bidding. The gubernatorial septuagenarian, alas, turned out to have less juice with the Vacationland electorate than a West Coast India Pale Ale, suspending her own campaign in late April of this year.
What might a craft brewery owner have to offer as a U.S. senator? Man, any number of things ranging from terrible to terrific. Craft brewing is not, as the once-popular saying goes, “99 percent asshole-free.” There are plenty of assholes in this business, as Hop Take has documented many times over the years. It is not, as former Atlantic staffer-turned-“Abundance”-hustler Derek Thompson put it in a 2018 piece that aged like milk, “the strangest, happiest economic story in America.” Even then, the segment’s “rising tides lifts all boats” myth had started to take on water.
There are over 9,000 breweries in the country, and to my knowledge, exactly one of them has sent a member to the upper chamber, in the modern era, at least. That would be Colorado’s junior senator, John Hickenlooper, who was the co-owner of Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing Company before getting into politics with a successful run for the mayor of the Mile-High City in 2003. People loved Hick! In 2005, TIME named him one of the five best big-city mayors in the country, alongside such political luminaries as Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Richard Daley of Chicago. (Gavin Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco, received an honorable mention. Plus ça change…) He served two terms as mayor, then won the governor’s office in 2010 and held it for another two terms. After an ill-conceived and -fated presidential campaign in the early days of the 2020 race, he turned his aspirations to the Senate, where he’s held a seat ever since.
If that career path strikes you as conspicuously lengthy, it should. Hick, like most senators, took a long road to Capitol Hill that ran through multiple elected offices at the local and state levels first. Rocky Mountain voters didn’t elect a craft-brewery owner as their next senator; they elected their former governor, and the former mayor of their biggest city.
That doesn’t mean the leap from small-business ownership straight into the Senate is impossible, of course. Platner himself appeared poised to pull it off: The combat veteran’s civilian occupation is running an oyster farm in Downeast Maine. To his fervent supporters — not to mention the consultants who parachuted into the state, plucked him from obscurity, and plied him with visions of revolutionary grandeur — the inexperience was part of his everyman appeal. But long before the latest allegations broke, his many critics argued that without a record of public office, voters had no way to know what kind of senator Platner might be. His handlers’ suspicious choice to skip a formal vetting process did nothing to assuage these concerns.
Kleban has never held public office, either. He’s done some writing on what he would do as Maine’s junior senator, arguing in his newsletter for stronger anti-corruption measures and antitrust enforcement, as well as a faster clean-energy transition. (MBC’s Freeport brewery installed a massive solar array of its own in 2015, and has donated funds to Maine nonprofits that want to do likewise with their buildings.) He has vowed not to vote to promote Schumer, the wildly unpopular New York kingmaker rumored to have put the kibosh on Kleban’s planned campaign launch last summer, to majority leader should the party retake the Senate in November. It may be a snooze compared to Platner’s snarling, explicitly class-conscious message, but it’s solidly progressive stuff.
Still, there are gaps. Kleban’s “blueprint for policy ideas that will help the Democratic Party win back voters” includes a section on “Treat[ing] Workers Well” that makes no mention of unions, an eroding but still-crucial chunk of the party’s constituency. Small-business owners are still owners, after all, and craft brewery owners as a cohort have not shown themselves to be much more amenable to organized labor than their classmates. One wonders whether a base so energized by Platner’s pro-labor, anti-capitalist rhetoric would accept anything less than a full-throated endorsement for collective bargaining. Troy Jackson, the former state senate president who is leading the firehouse primary polling by healthy margins, is a card-carrying member of both the Painters and Allied Trades and the International Association of Machinists, and often campaigns in a T-shirt that says “SOLIDARITY.” How will a boss — even a good, compassionate boss from a local business in a non-extractive industry who pays his employees’ healthcare premiums and was offsetting his firm’s carbon emissions before the phrase “Green New Deal” entered the lexicon — match that energy?
If Kleban has a plan, he’ll have to deploy it fast. According to the Maine Democrats website, county meetings start tomorrow to select delegates who will vote in a special nomination later this month. National party organizations like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Senate Majority PAC are once again lining up funding and looking to back a winner against Collins, who is on her back foot in the face of yet another senseless killing, this one in Maine, by the Trump administration’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
“In the Senate, I’ll vote to hold ICE accountable and finally provide accountability for murdering people,” Kleban wrote on Tuesday, in the wake of the shooting that left a father dead in the street in Biddeford, some 40 minutes south of MBC. “This sh*t has to stop.”
A self-styled populist with a gravely voice, burly beard, and flannels aplenty, you might have mistaken Platner himself for the craft brewer in the race. Now that he’s exited in disgrace, will Mainers give an actual craft brewer a shot? Could it finally be Lunch time in Maine? We’ll find out — and soon.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
The hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabinol sector is really wriggling in advance of the Trump administration’s looming de facto ban, and things are getting weird. If you’re looking for hope, perhaps you’d be down with GOHA, brah. That’s the Goodness of Hemp Act, of course, a new piece of speculative legislation drawn up by a coalition of THC-oriented firms and their fellow travelers in hopes of finding a legislative champion to carry the thing on Capitol Hill. But if thinly sourced red-baiting is more your thing, this vexing nexus of plant-based intoxication and policy f*ckery has you covered, too. Just last week, a former interim director of the Department of Homeland Security during Trump 1.0 sent a letter to the House Select Committee on the Communist Party of China warning them of “mounting evidence” that that country’s operatives were using the THC trade as a way to… I don’t know, endanger American children, basically? Good and normal stuff from American First Policy Institute’s “Homeland Security & Immigration” lead. I can’t believe there are still three months to GOHA on this saga, brah.
📈 Ups…
Sure, beer inflation was +3.1 percent both home and away in June, but it was still trailing overall inflation (+3.5 percent) in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest Consumer Price Index… The taproom model really seems to have won out over the past decade, new BA analysis shows… Girl Beer landed a pro sports partnership with the Dallas Wings of the WNBA…
📉 …and downs
Disgraced BrewDog co-founder James Watt launched a stunt bid to reacquire the Scottish craft brewery from its new-ish owner, Tilray Brands… I guess Oskar Blues Brewing Co. is doing its weird Denim Dale’s promo again… In a potentially bad sign for World Cup beer sales, key tourism indicators still declined during the tournament…
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