About Us

After more than ten years of constant sleep deprivation and health issues from early morning bakery shifts, Dan Towle left bread baking as an employee and started baking for himself in an infamous apartment on Vesper Street in Portland, Maine. In 2019, he opened Vesper Bread as a farmstead bakery in a Scarborough farm kitchen, and in 2021, Vesper Bread moved to Freedom, Maine. We kept the old name for two reasons:
(1) Living in that crumbling apartment on Vesper Street and paying relatively affordable rent is what enabled us to save the money we used to move to Freedom and set up our own commercial kitchen and bakery.
(2) Vesper is an archaic word that means evening, Venus as the evening star, or evening song/prayer. It’s also the name of a kind of sparrow.

Vesper Bread is now headquartered in a former machine shop building in our backyard in Freedom. Danny bakes the bread and Kelsey helps eat (and sell) the bread.

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Good bread is full of history, and history is chock full of bread! We are passionate about our collective bread heritage, and love to learn. We keep a reading list that we’d love to keep adding to, so please let us know what you’re learning! As predominantly white descendants of European colonizers living in rural Maine on Wabanaki territory, we are working toward integrity in terms of acknowledging and compensating local Indigenous people for their development and knowledge of the crops we eat and their stewardship of the land we live off of.

We also revel in our Polish, German, Scandinavian, and old New England inheritance of dense rye and spelt breads like dinkelbrot, sandwich loaves, 100% rye breads, and cornmeal breads like Anadamas, all made with locally grown grains.

We have arrived at our dream bread bakery with the help of many teachers, especially Al Reid, co-founder of Scratch Baking Co. She taught Danny (and many other bread bakers!) the way of real good bread over the years he worked there.