Cold River Vodka sits on Route 1 in Freeport, Maine, in a converted 1800s farmhouse that feels more like visiting someone’s ambitious home project than a commercial distillery. Chris Dowe and Donnie Thibodeau founded the operation in 2005, driven by a pretty simple idea: Maine potatoes should make better vodka than anything coming out of grain distilleries. Dowe, who previously worked in real estate, and Thibodeau, a former restaurant owner, started small with a 250-gallon copper still and a conviction that their state’s famous spuds were being wasted on french fries when they could be making premium spirits. The story gets interesting when you learn they were among the first craft distillers in Maine, opening when most people thought ‘craft spirits’ meant expensive imports. They source their potatoes from a single farm in Aroostook County – Maine’s potato heartland – and distill everything on-site using a process that’s more labor-intensive than most vodka production. The farmhouse setting isn’t just aesthetic; they renovated the building themselves, keeping the original wide-plank floors and adding custom copper equipment that gleams against century-old wooden beams. What you’ll find here is a genuinely small operation where the founders are usually around to talk about their process. The tasting room occupies what used to be the farmhouse living room, complete with a fireplace that gets lit on cold Maine days. They’ve expanded their lineup beyond the original potato vodka to include gin and seasonal spirits, but everything still gets made in small batches with the same attention to local sourcing that started the whole thing.