PORTLAND, Maine (NEWS CENTER) -- Heather Sanborn left the corporate law world for to work in beer, but that doesn't mean she isn't putting her knowledge to use.
Sanborn is the co-owner and business manager at Rising Tide Brewery in Portland. She said she took a leap of faith two years ago when she decided to become a bigger part of her husband's brewery. She's using her legal background to change Maine alcohol laws for craft breweries.
"I can't imagine doing anything else, but I know that if I look back, even just four years ago, I never imagined doing this, so it's really been an adventure," Sanborn said.
Sanborn was practicing law in corporate litigations and securities while her husband started home brewing beer. She left law two years ago to join her husband in business.
"All the things I learned working for businesses I can apply to my own business. I feel like I got an MBA by working for other businesses and helping them with their legal problems, so that's been a really fun experience."
As the craft beer industry continues to expand exponentially, Sanborn is working to modernize Maine beer laws. One of the first laws she tackled was the lack of legislation that allowed for breweries to charge for tastings.
"That was really, really important because a small brewery like Rising Tide can't afford to have staff in our tasting room unless we can charge for samples," she said.
Rising Tide now has four tasting room employees and models its events off of breweries in Oregon and California. Sanborn said those states have a "tasting room culture" -- food trucks parked outside, locals coming in to fill up growlers, and tourists stopping in for samples.
On an economic level for the state, Sanborn is working to streamline Maine beer festivals as part of the Maine Brewers' Guild. She said there has always been beer festivals in Maine, but they had hurdles that made them difficult for brewies. One of the hurdles didn't allow breweries to pour their own beer for paying customers, making it difficult for consumers to interact with brewers.
"This was a very old school way of understanding what a beer festival was and how it could be organized," she said.
The piece of legislation Sanborn and the Brewers' Guild put together passed this past session and went into effect as an emergency piece of legislation. It will apply this summer to all the festivals.
If future opportunities of improvement arise, the Brewers' Guild will be ready with a full-time, paid executive director and a lobbyist group in Augusta, thanks in part to Sanborn's efforts in the field of beer legislation.
