Ambition Brewery hosts a Brewberry Festival

Brianna Reynolds of Livermore Falls bar tends at Ambition Brewery on Main Street in Wilton. The brewery has its full staff working again and is hiring another employee after being closed for over six weeks. Andrea Swiedom/Franklin Journal

WILTON — Ambition Brewery will host its first Brewberry Festival August 6-8, which was meant to coincide with Wilton’s canceled Blueberry Festival.

The Brewery recently renovated and connected its taproom to the former Collins Cakes and Bakes building, which expands Ambition’s seating to 40 following CDC socially distanced guidelines.

The three day brew festival will include a number of new beer releases, live music, food and games. On Thursday, August 6, Ambition will release its blueberry wheat and blueberry cream ale made from Maine blueberry puree.

“Friday we’re going to release a brand new Vienna lager and another legendary beer, and that one’s a triple IPA and it’s our first triple,” co-owner of Ambition Brewery Jeff Chaisson said.

The Brewery has a legendary mug club in which members submit a beer idea to Chaisson and have the opportunity to take part in developing the recipe. These member developed beers are what Chaisson refers to as legendary beers.

“We try to brew three barrels a week, but the way we’re set up, we’re so small, we like to play with recipes and that’s what this is all about, recipe development,” Chaisson said.

On Friday, Ambition will also host a German-themed night that will include a bratwurst dinner, beer cheese and pretzels and feature the new, Nien K Lager. The day is dubbed as The Least Ambitious K as it was meant to be concurrent with the Blueberry Festival’s 10 K.

On Saturday, Chaisson will be firing up the griddle to cook a full breakfast that will reference an Old Boiler Room tradition, kegs and eggs.

“That’s what they used to do on Blueberry Fest every year, kegs and eggs,” Chaisson said. “So you would buy a meal with beer, all set price, eggs, sausage, bacon. We’re hoping to have some toast with spent grain bread.”

Ambition will be selling tickets ahead of time for the bratwurst dinner as well as kegs and eggs.

Customers will have two new beers to choose from on Saturday to go with their eggs, a coffee milk stout and a coffee milk white stout.

“Both of those were made with Life’s Perks Coffee, cold brew and beans themselves. We used the whole beans in the recipe. That was fun,” Chaisson said. “The white stout is kind of a fun beer, its very light in color. When you pour it on nitro, it’ll be basically a white. It’ll cascade up.”

Both Friday and Saturday have three time slots for live, local musicians. Chaisson is still looking to fill those slots and encourages artists to contact him.

Ambition Brewery primarily relies on tap and growler sales, but is slowly accruing more distribution accounts as restaurants reopen and start to do more business. Co-owner Jeff Chaisson recently secured three taps at the newly opened Farmhouse Beer Garden in Farmington. Andrea Swiedom/Franklin Journal

While Chaisson does not see the Brewberry Fest as an opportunity to make the same record sales that he did last year during Wilton’s Blueberry Festival, he does hope that it will create some publicity for their one year old business. He said one of the major difficulties being a new business during the pandemic has been the lack of established customers.

“We have some people that want to come out and support us, but others they’re not going to browse around and find us right now. They’re gonna go where they know, go where they think it’s safe,” he said.