AT the end of a five-hour drive along the Interstates of New England and into an out-of-the-way corner of Portland, Me., past a Hannaford’s Supermarket and into an anonymous-looking industrial park, alongside businesses with names like North Atlantic Scaffolding and Lynox Cleaning Systems, it was the sweet smell that hit us first.

We were just inside the front office of the D. L. Geary Brewing Company, where two black Labs lounged among the cubicles. The sound that followed, as we passed through a plain door into the back brewery after half a day on the road, was even sweeter, in its own way: Thaddeus Mullen, a stubbled 35-year-old brewer in a T-shirt, jeans and Boston Bruins hat, looked up and said, “You guys want a beer?”

Yes. And we had come to the right place. It may be the blustery weather or it may be the local populace’s stubborn independence, but Maine has grown into a hub of craft brewing, a smaller-scale East Coast answer to Oregon. D. L. Geary, in business since 1986, was a Maine microbrewing pioneer, the first in the state, and for us — a dedicated craft brew drinker and his designated driver who, all things considered, prefers Coors Light — it was the first stop on a satisfying beer tour 170 miles up the coast to Bar Harbor.

Over the course of the weekend, we would find two barns, one shaggy old mule and a tasty blueberry pie, but here at Geary, toting ice-cold bottles of the company’s signature pale ale on a tour through the entire brewing process in the company’s factory, we were surrounded, Willy Wonka-style, by canvas sacks of fragrant hops and big open fermentation tanks of bubbling brew.