• A lethal hold on Maine
• Alcohol-impaired susceptible to rages of fire
• A history of alcohol
• Alcohol's effects on the body
• How reporters researched and wrote this series
• Alcohol-related deaths in 1991

Bartender Pam Rideout mixes a ''sombrero,'' a drink with Allen's Coffee Flavored Brandy and milk, at the Barn Board in Rumford earlier this month. The syrupy brandy is the top-selling liquor in Maine, where an estimated 90,000 nine-liter cases are consumed each year. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

It's caramel-flavored, sells for five bucks a pint and comes in plastic gallon jugs. It's Maine's favorite drug.

Coffee-flavored brandy, a syrupy 70-proof liquor, is the top-selling booze in Maine.

The most popular brand is Allen's Coffee Flavored Brandy. Maine people drink more of it than any of the other 49 states.

Better than one in seven bottles of liquor sold in Maine is Allen's Coffee Flavored Brandy.

''By far, Maine has the highest per-capita consumption of Allen's than anywhere in the country,'' said Gary Shaw, vice president of M.S. Walker, a family-owned Somerville, Mass., company that makes and sells the inexpensive brandy.

Each month, M.S. Walker ships ''a phenomenal amount'' of brandy to Maine. Mainers buy 87,635 nine-liter cases of it each year. Liquor experts speculate that Mainers probably consume more than 90,000 cases, since many residents buy their booze in New Hampshire, where it is cheaper.

Mainers drink nearly three times as much Allen's as their next-favored spirit: Bacardi rum.

This liking for brandy is no surprise to police officers, judges, defense attorneys and people who work with domestic violence cases. Empty brandy bottles are found at murder scenes, fatal fires, drunken-driving crashes, and homes where domestic violence happens.

After Gary Sledzik careened down Interstate 295 in March and killed two people at a tollbooth in Scarborough, investigators found a half-empty bottle of coffee brandy in his truck.

Sledzik later pleaded guilty to 13 charges in connection with the accident, which killed a New Hampshire woman and her 13-year-old daughter.

''Coffee-flavored brandy is the drink of choice,'' says Maine Superior Court Judge Robert Crowley. ''It's very prevalent in the criminals who come before me. I don't know whether brandy is more bang for your buck but it runs the gamut. I see it in bar fights, domestic assaults, OUIs and worse crimes.''

While defending a client on cocaine charges recently, Portland criminal defense lawyer Thomas Connolly remarked to the prosecutor: ''Cocaine is nothing compared to the real drug . . .''

Before Connolly could finish his sentence, the Lincoln County prosecutor, Eric Morse, replied in unison with Connolly: ''Allen's.''

''Again and again I see people in trouble that have been drinking this stuff,'' Connolly says.

Connolly theorizes that because the brandy is almost always consumed with milk, people can drink large quantities of it.

''While too much wine will make your stomach too acidic and too much straight booze makes you pass out, brandy and milk keeps people going all night,'' Connolly says. ''And the high amounts of sugar and caffeine in this stuff keeps people wired.''

Police, prosecutors and defense attorneys often joke that if not for Allen's and the milk it's mixed with, a lot of Mainers wouldn't get their daily dose of vitamin D.

When police stop teen-agers for driving drunk they'll often find brandy bottles in their car.

''You see it with a lot of underage kids coming and going to parties,'' said State Trooper Christopher Cyr, who patrols Oxford County. ''And whenever juveniles ask someone to buy them liquor, it seems that brandy is their first choice.''

Sanford Police Detective Randy White routinely sees adults and juveniles walking around town with plastic milk jugs filled with a coffee-colored liquid.

''They mix the brandy and milk,'' White says. ''They'll walk around drinking it and be pretty blatant about it.''

About six months ago, White spotted some graffiti on an old mill wall that confirmed Allen's popularity among the town's teens.

Sandwiched between a marijuana leaf and a peace sign on the red-brick wall was a white spray-painted outline of a three-foot-tall bottle. Inside the bottle, someone had scrawled the words: Allen's Coffee Brandy.

''I wasn't surprised,'' White says. ''There are a lot of people that worship that particular kind of brandy.''

In northern and central Maine, Allen's is jokingly referred to as ''the flower of the tundra.''

In the dead of winter, its remnants - empty brandy bottles and plastic jugs - litter Maine's back roads and piney woods.

''Coffee-flavored brandy is the standard joke in central and northern Maine,'' said the Rev. Robert Leon, a Chebeague Island pastor who worked in central Maine for 15 years.

Whenever he took walks in the central Maine woods, Leon was astonished at how often he'd stumble across empty coffee-flavored brandy bottles.

''You could almost follow the trail of the skidders (log-hauling tractors) by the empty bottles,''recalled Leon, who worked for 15 years in Penobscot and Somerset counties before becoming the pastor for the United Methodist Church on Chebeague Island. ''We used to joke that the machines ran on brandy rather than gasoline.''