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Running out of beer is one of those "good problems" for a brewery to have. Bissell Brothers Brewing, known for it's 3-B's logo and hop-filled IPAs, officially opened it's doors on December 7th, 2013 and hasn't been able to turn out enough beer since. While Peter joined us in-studio to talk business, it was Noah Bissell's goal to start the brewery. He started home-brewing while in college and realized the potential of a craft brewery in Portland while staying with Peter in the summer of 2010. The following fall, Noah shared a new home brew with the family. Peter remembers it tasting distinctly like "licking an ashtray," but many of Noah's other recipes had been good and in 2012 Noah and Peter really started considering the possibility of owning and operating their own brewery.

GrandyOat's Aaron Anker came to Maine in 1998. Originally from upstate New York, Anker attended the University of New Hampshire where he met classmate Nat Pierce. The rest of the GrandyOats story isn't exactly "happily ever after," but it's close enough.

Growing up, Leif Oxburgh split his time between Scotland, where he went to high school and Sweden, where he got his Ph. D. In 1999, he received an opportunity to study in a lab at Harvard and moved to the states. He studied the influenza virus until 2004 when he was ready for a new endeavor. In 2004, when Maine Medical Center's Research Institute was still in it's infancy, Dr. Oxburgh accepted a position as a Faculty Scientist and began his research on nephrology and stem cells and the possibilities of growing or assembling a lab-created kidney.

Heather Davis moved to Maine because it seemed like a good place to raise a family. The self-declared "bookworm" found her calling while teaching a creative writing class to kids in Harlem. From there she co-founded a writing center in Texas called the Austin Bat Cave. After the birth of her daughter in 2007, she and her husband decided to move back to the east coast to be closer to family and decided Portland would be a suitable place to live. She discovered Portland's The Telling Room, a non-profit writing center for school-aged children and knew it was the place for her. She has been the Executive Director since 2011 and was crucial to helping the organization win a National Arts & Humanities Youth Program Award along with a grant for $10,000.

Have you ever seen the stacks of shipping containers at the end of Commercial Street in Portland and wonder where they came from? So did Maine artist Justin Levesque. After arriving home from an Icelandic vacation, he recognized Eimskip's Icelandic name and started thinking about why they were here. Levesque holds a BFA from USM where he specialized in the critical analysis of images and their impact on social norms and community expectations. His ICELANDx207 project will ultimately focus on portraits of Icelanders in Maine, the revitalized shipping industry in Portland, Maine and a podcast of Levesque's journey aboard MV Selfoss from Portland to Reykjavik.

What do you do when your locally-made, custom-ordered apparel start-up company needs employees and there's no one in the area capable to do the work? If you're Ben Waxman and Whitney Reynolds, you partner with other local companies to recruit and train the workforce you need. American Roots, owned by Waxman and Reynolds, is the sister company to Old Port Wool and Textiles, owned by Waxman's mother, Dory Waxman. They are a custom-made fleece apparel company based in downtown Portland and their orders are coming in so quickly, they're fast outgrowing their Danforth Street shop. With business-to-business orders keeping them busy through the summer of 2016, this new Portland business is already looking to grow - and fast.