It started with colleagues going for a beer after a hard day's work.

Fast forward, and it's a collaboration between a local brewery and the University of Maine centered around a beverage that dates back hundreds of years.

"A lot of the forestry guys are in here regular, and some of them approached us about doing a beer with spruce tips," said Clay Randall, Head Brewer at Marsh Island Brewing.

"We have abundant spruce, so it didn't seem to be an issue to us," said Keith Kanoti, UMaine's Forest Manager. "It's worked out rather nicely."

With that, Green Growth was born.

"We got 36 pounds of tips over the course of two days," said Clay.

"This is a traditional way of beer making to use spruce tips," added Keith. "It goes back a long, long way."

"The original settlers were brewing with spruce before they were using hops, as far as I know," said Clay. "This is what they originally were using when they came over from Europe on the Mayflower right after they got here."

The beer of the pilgrims is now available at Marsh Island and Black Bear Brewing locations.

"Both breweries are going to donate a dollar back from every beer sale to the University of Maine Forestry Department, and they are going to use the proceeds to put a new maple sugar shack in the forest there," said Clay.

"We have the forest, and we like to showcase different products from the forest," added Keith. "We also make maple syrup and lumber and sell logs and all those things. It's just another gift from the forest so to speak," said Keith.

"Get to kind of interact with people that are normally in here with our passion every day, and then to be brought into their world and experience what their passion is about and kind of balance the two and blend them together and learn while we were doing it to kind of get another trick under our belt, it was a cool thing," said Clay. "And then to be able to give back to the university which is the heart and soul of the town is bigger than we thought it was going to be. It started off as a small idea and grew into something bigger."