The idea was born during a family vacation!

 

Being gluten-free can be the brunt of a lot of jokes, but anyone who has celiac disease knows it's not funny at all. So having celiac simply means your body has a bad reaction to gluten. Gluten (unfortunately), is a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye. Guess what beer is made from? Yup. Some have all of the above. So Lucky Pigeon had to get creative and still make a damn fine beer. They use millet, rice, buckwheat, gluten-free oats, and quinoa. No gluten in any of it.

Lucky Pigeon Brewing
Lucky Pigeon Brewing
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Lucky Pigeon Brewing is a majority women-owned bar that is fairly new to brewery-heavy Maine. They started in 2018, and their tasting room opened to the public in September 2021. All the ingredients they use are 100% gluten-free. That includes draft beer and cans to go!

Lucky Pigeon Brewing
Lucky Pigeon Brewing
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As breweries exploded in Maine, unfortunately, so did the number of people who realized that they have an aversion to gluten! By the way, according to the Maine Brewers Guild, there were 32 active breweries at the end of the '90s. In 2020, Maine had 155 breweries with 100 different unique brands. Being a gluten-free brewery is pretty brilliant. As of 2016, 8% of the population in North America followed a strict gluten-free diet. That means beer is a no no!

By the way, why is it called Lucky Pigeon Brewing? The original Lucky Pigeon is the founding owner, Kathleen Pigeon. Yes, she has celiac disease. According to WMTW, she never gets tired of people thanking her for being here. They are in Biddeford in a nice airy space in the historic Pepperell Mill.

LOOK: Best Beers From Every State

To find the best beer in each state and Washington D.C., Stacker analyzed January 2020 data from BeerAdvocate, a website that gathers user scores for beer in real-time. BeerAdvocate makes its determinations by compiling consumer ratings for all 50 states and Washington D.C. and applying a weighted rank to each. The weighted rank pulls the beer toward the list's average based on the number of ratings it has and aims to allow lesser-known beers to increase in rank. Only beers with at least 10 rankings to be considered; we took it a step further to only include beers with at least 100 user rankings in our gallery. Keep reading to find out what the best beer is in each of the 50 states and Washington D.C.

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